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Dessert

Sweet Macaroni

A sweet pasta dish made with milk, macaroni, sugar, eggs, and optional cream, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Sweet Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Bring the milk to a boil in a pot.

  2. Gently add the macaroni, salt, and lemon or orange rind (or cinnamon).

  3. Simmer until the macaroni is tender.

  4. Add the sugar and boil until the macaroni is soft and swollen.

  5. Drain the macaroni and place it in a hot dish.

Finish and serve

  1. In a bowl, whisk the eggs and stir them into the milk over low heat until thickened.

  2. Pour the egg mixture over the macaroni and serve immediately.

  3. Alternatively, heat and sweeten the cream, pour it over the macaroni, and dust with cinnamon.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Milk
Cooks the macaroni and, with the eggs, forms the thickened custard that coats it.
Fine pipe macaroni
Provides the starchy body of the dish, softening and swelling as it simmers in the milk.
Eggs
Thicken the warm milk into a custard through gentle heat-setting of their proteins.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the macaroni soften as it boils.

The step that matters

Stirring the eggs into the milk over low heat. Egg proteins set at moderate temperatures. If the heat is too high or the mixture boils hard, the eggs can scramble into lumps instead of forming a smooth, thickened custard.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, egg, cream, 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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