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Macaroni K i’Americaine

A macaroni dish with tomato sauce, butter, flour, and topped with croutons and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Macaroni K i’Americaine

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Boil the macaroni in salted water until tender.

  2. Strain and rinse the macaroni in cold water, then cut into small pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Add the flour and stir in the tomato puree.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and sugar, and let it boil.

  4. Stir in the macaroni and heat through.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot dish, topped with croutons and brown bread crumbs.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Tomato + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Forms the main body of the dish, giving it bite once cooked and cut.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the tomato mixture into a sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Tomato puree
Provides the main flavor and acidity, and turns the sauce a rich red color.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the melted butter. Flour must cook briefly in the fat before liquid is added, or the sauce can taste raw and form lumps. Stirring keeps the starch evenly dispersed as it thickens.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, sugar, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, sugar, bread. 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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