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Macaroni Soup

A soup made with macaroni, arrowroot, milk, and water, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and pepper work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 329 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Macaroni Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the macaroni

  1. Boil the macaroni in 2 quarts of water until tender.

  2. Drain the macaroni and cut into short pieces.

Make the soup

  1. Prepare the arrowroot with milk until very thin.

  2. Mix 1 pint of milk and 1 pint of water.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Add the prepared arrowroot and macaroni to achieve the desired soup consistency.

  5. If needed, add a little more water and bring to a boil again.

  6. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

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. Arrowroot + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together329 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Milk + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26,984 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni
Provides the bulk and chewy texture of the soup.
Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, glossy soup as it heats.
Milk
Adds richness and body to the broth.

The step that matters

Add the prepared arrowroot to the boiling liquid. Arrowroot must be dispersed in cold or thin liquid first and then stirred into boiling liquid. Added as a lump or without stirring, it clumps and thickens unevenly, so the soup ends up lumpy rather than smooth.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, pepper. 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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