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Cold Meat and Scrap Cookery

A cold dish of cooked pipe macaroni mixed with white sauce, cheese, herbs, and egg yolk, served on toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cheese and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,130 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cold Meat and Scrap Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the cooked pipe macaroni with enough plain white sauce to create a thick mixture.

  2. Add the grated cheese, herbs, and seasoning, and stir until the cheese is dissolved.

  3. Bring the sauce to a boil, then reduce heat.

  4. Once the right consistency is reached, beat in the raw egg yolk gradually, keeping the pan near the heat without boiling.

  5. Squeeze in a little lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve on a round of toast or fried bread, garnished with cooked vegetables or slices of toast.

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. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

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

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sauce + cheesetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Lemon + breadtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

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

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Cooked pipe macaroni
Provides the bulk and body of the dish, holding the sauce together.
Grated cheese
Melts into the sauce to add richness and savoury flavour.
Raw egg yolk
Thickens the sauce gently as it heats, giving it a smooth, creamy texture.
Plain white sauce
Forms the creamy base that coats the macaroni.

The step that matters

Adding the raw egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens through gentle heat. If the sauce boils or the yolk is added too quickly, it can scramble and turn grainy instead of smooth and creamy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, cheese, egg, bread):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, cheese, egg, 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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