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Maccaroni in Curry Sauce

A macaroni dish simmered in a curry sauce with optional coconut, cream, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Maccaroni in Curry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Cook the macaroni in slightly salted water with a small bit of butter until tender, about 15 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pot, mix the stock or gravy with curry powder and arrowroot, and boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Stir in the cream or béchamel just before adding the macaroni.

Combine and serve

  1. Toss the macaroni in the sauce until well coated.

  2. Add lemon juice before serving.

  3. Simmer grated coconut in the gravy for 30 minutes.

  4. Strain the coconut from the gravy.

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 + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + coconuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Butter + coconuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + coconuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni (in the method)
Pasta gives the dish its bulk and a surface for the sauce to cling to.
Beef or veal stock
Provides the savoury liquid base that the curry sauce is built on.
Curry powder
Supplies the warm, spiced aroma that defines the dish.
Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body and a glossy finish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, spiced sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the cream or béchamel just before adding the macaroni. Cream and béchamel can split or turn grainy when kept at a boil for long. Adding them at the end, off prolonged heat, keeps the sauce smooth and creamy.

Swap the coconut

The recipe marks coconut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, arrowroot, lemon, butter, cream):

  1. Coconutthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Orangefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, arrowroot, lemon, butter, cream. 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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