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Curried Maccaroni

A pasta dish of ribband macaroni tossed in a curry‑flavored stock with optional cream or béchamel.

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 ↓

Curried Maccaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Boil the macaroni in slightly salted water with a small bit of butter for 15 minutes.

  2. Drain the macaroni and set it aside.

Make the curry sauce

  1. In a pot, mix the stock or gravy with curry powder and arrowroot.

  2. Boil the mixture for 20 minutes.

Combine and finish

  1. Add the macaroni to the sauce and toss gently until well coated.

  2. Stir in cream or béchamel.

  3. Add lemon juice.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Beef + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together155 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Ribbon macaroni (in the method)
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the sauce as it is tossed.
Beef or veal stock
Provides the savoury liquid base that carries the curry flavour.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma and flavour that define the dish.
Arrowroot
Thickens the stock into a glossy sauce that clings to the pasta.
Cream or béchamel
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the curry and arrowroot mixture. Arrowroot thickens only when the liquid is hot enough to gelatinise its starch, and it can turn thin or slack if it is not fully heated. Boiling the mixture for the full time lets the starch swell and the curry flavour mellow into the stock.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, lemon, butter, cream):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, lemon, butter, 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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