Name: Macaroni with Bread Crumbs
Ingredients: 2 cups macaroni; 1 cup milk; 1 cup broth; ¼ teaspoon salt; 1 cup bread crumbs

Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Macaroni with Bread Crumbs

Ingredients

Directions

Wash the macaroni.
Simmer the macaroni in half milk and half broth with a little salt until tender.
Remove the macaroni from the liquid and place it on a dish.
Sprinkle bread crumbs over the macaroni.

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.

Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni: Forms the body of the dish and soaks up the simmering liquid as it cooks.
Milk: Adds richness and creaminess to the cooking liquid.
Broth: Adds savory depth to the cooking liquid.
Bread crumbs: Gives a crisp, dry texture as a topping.

“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.