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Dessert

A Very Nice Dish of Macaroni Dressed Sweet

A sweet macaroni dish cooked in milk with lemon peel and cinnamon, topped with custard and served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

A Very Nice Dish of Macaroni Dressed Sweet

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the macaroni

  1. Boil macaroni in milk with lemon peel and cinnamon until swollen but not broken.

Assemble and serve

  1. Lay macaroni in a custard dish.

  2. Pour hot custard over the macaroni.

  3. Serve cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Macaroni
Swells as it simmers in milk, forming the body of the dish.
Milk
Cooks the macaroni slowly, giving it moisture and a soft texture.
Custard
Forms the creamy, set topping that binds the dish together.

The step that matters

Boil the macaroni until swollen but not broken. Pasta cooked in milk absorbs liquid and softens gradually. Overcooking makes it split and turn mushy, while stopping too early leaves it firm in the centre.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cinnamon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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