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Macaroni and Rice

A macaroni dish with tomato sauce, butter, and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Macaroni and Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the macaroni until tender and drain.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat and sauté the minced onion until yellow.

  3. Stir in the flour, then add the tomatoes, peppercorns, garlic, basil, and salt.

  4. Boil until the tomatoes are soft, then strain the mixture through a sieve, discarding the garlic and peppercorns.

  5. Return the pulp to the saucepan, add a lump of butter and the egg yolk, and heat through.

Serve

  1. Mix the sauce with the macaroni and serve immediately.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + basiltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,979 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Garlic + basiltop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,805 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Clove + basiltop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni
Forms the bulk of the dish and carries the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the onion and sauce base.
Tomatoes
Provide acidity, moisture and body for the sauce once softened and strained.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and gives it a smoother, thicker texture when heated.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid from the tomatoes and butter.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens when heated, but if the sauce is too hot it can scramble into lumps. Heat it gently and keep it moving so the sauce stays smooth.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, flour, tomato, garlic, basil, coffee):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Oreganofits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, flour, tomato, garlic, basil, coffee. 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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