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Macaroni Ik Genoese Style

A baked macaroni dish with Genoese‑style meat sauce, cheese, and mushrooms.

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 Ik Genoese Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the mushrooms in warm water to cover them.

  2. In a quart saucepan, heat olive oil and butter until very hot, stirring to prevent burning.

  3. Add the meat to the hot oil and butter, cooking until light brown.

  4. Stir in the onion and garlic, cooking until browned.

Make the gravy

  1. Add the tomatoes and stew for about 10 minutes.

  2. Add the soaked mushrooms and their liquid, parsley, salt, and pepper, and stew until thickened, stirring frequently.

Cook the macaroni and serve

  1. In a large pot, boil 1½ gallons of water and add 1 tablespoon of salt.

  2. Add the macaroni and boil until tender, then drain in a colander.

  3. In a baking dish, layer grated cheese, then pour in a layer of gravy, followed by macaroni, and top with more gravy.

  4. Mix thoroughly and serve.

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 + olivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,539 recipes

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

  3. Garlic + olivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef or chicken
Provides the main meaty body of the gravy, browned first for flavour.
Edam cheese
Melts into the layers, adding richness and a savoury, stringy pull.
Macaroni or spaghetti
Forms the starchy base that soaks up the gravy and holds the dish together.
Tomatoes
Adds acidity and body to the gravy as they stew down.
Dried mushrooms
Adds deep, earthy flavour, and their soaking liquid is kept in the gravy.
Olive oil and butter
Carry heat for browning and add fat that rounds out the gravy's flavour.

The step that matters

Browning the meat and onion. Deep browning through the Maillard reaction builds the savoury base of the gravy. Pale meat stewed in liquid tastes flat, and very hot fat needs stirring to avoid scorching.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, beef, onion, garlic, tomato, mushroom, olive):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, beef, onion, garlic, tomato, mushroom, olive. 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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