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Preserve

To Make Macaroni

A homemade pasta made by beating eggs, adding flour, kneading, cutting into strips, drying, and storing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Make Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs for 8 to 10 minutes.

  2. Strain the eggs and stir in flour until stiff enough to form a paste.

  3. Knead the paste on a marble or stone slab, adding more flour as needed.

Shape and dry

  1. Cut off a small piece, roll it out thinly, and cut into narrow strips.

  2. Twist the strips and lay them on a clean cloth in a dry, warm place.

  3. Let them dry for a few hours until hard.

Store

  1. Store in a box with white paper underneath and on top.

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide structure and richness, binding the flour into a firm dough.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its body and chewy texture.

The step that matters

Kneading the paste. Kneading develops gluten so the dough becomes elastic enough to roll thinly without tearing. Adding flour too freely makes the dough stiff and dry, so add it only as needed.

“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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