Skip to main content
Dessert

Sweet Macaroni

A sweet macaroni dish cooked with milk, sugar, eggs, and flavored with citrus rind or cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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.

  5. Boil until the macaroni is soft and swollen.

  6. Drain the macaroni.

  7. Place the drained macaroni in a hot dish.

Make the custard and serve

  1. Whisk the eggs in a bowl.

  2. Stir the whisked eggs into the milk over low heat until thickened.

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

  4. Heat and sweeten the cream.

  5. Pour the heated cream over the macaroni.

  6. Dust the dish 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

Macaroni
Absorbs the sweetened milk and swells, forming the body of the dish.
Eggs
Thicken the milk into a custard that coats the macaroni.
Milk
Cooks the pasta and forms the base of the custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the milk so the dish tastes sweet.
Rich cream
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty finish when poured over the dish.

The step that matters

Stir the whisked eggs into the milk over low heat until thickened. Egg proteins set when heated, so over high heat or with too little stirring the eggs can scramble and curdle instead of thickening smoothly into a 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes