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Maccaroni in Curry Sauce

A pasta dish of macaroni simmered in a curry sauce made from stock, curry powder, arrowroot, lemon juice, and optional cream or coconut.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Maccaroni in Curry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Cook the macaroni in slightly salted water with a small bit of butter until tender, about 15 minutes.

Make the curry sauce

  1. In a separate pot, mix the stock or gravy with curry powder and arrowroot, and boil for 20 minutes.

  2. For added flavor, simmer grated coconut in the gravy for 30 minutes, then strain.

  3. Stir in the cream or béchamel just before adding the macaroni.

Combine and serve

  1. Toss the macaroni in the sauce until well coated, then add lemon juice before serving.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + coconuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + coconuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Beef + coconuttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together182 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Cream + coconuttop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,223 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni (in the method)
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the sauce as it cooks until tender.
Beef or veal stock or gravy
Provides the savoury liquid base that carries the curry flavour.
Arrowroot
Thickens the stock so the sauce coats the macaroni.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice aroma and flavour of the sauce.
Cream or béchamel
Adds richness and a smoother, rounder texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with arrowroot. Arrowroot must be fully dispersed in the stock and kept at a gentle boil so it thickens evenly; if it is added clumped or boiled too hard, it can lose its thickening power and leave lumps or a thin sauce.

Swap the coconut

The recipe marks coconut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, arrowroot, lemon, cream):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Coconutthe original
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, arrowroot, lemon, cream. 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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