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Baked Spaghetti

A baked pasta dish with macaroni, butter, cheese, milk, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Baked Spaghetti

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Break the spaghetti into 2-inch pieces.

  2. Cook in boiling salted water for 20 minutes until tender but not broken.

  3. Drain the spaghetti and layer it in a buttered bake-dish with grated cheese and bits of butter, seasoning with salt.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the milk over the layers, ensuring it sinks to the bottom.

  2. Top with a thick layer of grated cheese.

  3. Cover and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  4. Uncover and brown the top under the broiler if desired.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  3. Cheese + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Spaghetti
Forms the bulk of the dish and, once cooked until tender, gives the baked layers their structure.
Milk
Adds moisture that soaks into the pasta as it bakes, keeping the dish creamy rather than dry.
Grated cheese
Melts through the layers to bind them together and adds richness and savoury flavour.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the top and dish surface brown.

The step that matters

Cook the spaghetti until tender but not broken. Pasta that is undercooked stays firm and will not soften enough during baking, while overcooked pasta breaks apart and turns mushy once layered and baked in liquid.

“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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