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Dessert

A Very Nice Dish of Macaroni Dressed Sweet

A sweet macaroni custard made with milk, lemon peel, and cinnamon, served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

A Very Nice Dish of Macaroni Dressed Sweet

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Boil macaroni in milk with lemon peel and cinnamon until swollen but not breaking.

Assemble and serve

  1. Lay macaroni in a custard dish.

  2. Pour hot custard over macaroni.

  3. Serve cold.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  2. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni
Provides the body and bulk of the dish, its starch swelling as it absorbs the milk.
Milk
Serves as the liquid that the macaroni absorbs and forms the creamy custard base.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma to the milk as it is simmered with the macaroni.

The step that matters

Boil macaroni until swollen but not breaking. Pasta starch swells as it absorbs liquid, but overcooking softens the outer structure until it falls apart. Stopping when the pieces are swollen and still hold their shape keeps the macaroni intact in the custard.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon. 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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