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White Macaroni Soup

A creamy white soup made with macaroni, milk, butter, and bone stock, seasoned with salt, white pepper, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,418 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

White Macaroni Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Boil veal or mutton bones to prepare stock.

  2. If using vegetables, boil onion or leek, a slice of turnip, and a small piece of celery in the stock for 20 minutes, then strain.

Make the soup

  1. Melt butter in a stewpan.

  2. Stir in cornflour.

  3. Pour in milk and stock.

  4. Stir until it boils.

  5. Boil macaroni in salted water for 20 minutes.

  6. Strain macaroni.

  7. Cut macaroni into 1-inch pieces.

  8. Add macaroni to soup.

  9. Simmer for 10 minutes.

  10. Season with salt, white pepper, and lemon juice before serving.

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. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, 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 soup as the starchy, chewy pasta element.
Milk
Adds richness and a creamy, smooth texture to the soup.
Butter
Provides fat for flavour and helps form the base with the cornflour.
Bone stock
Supplies the main savoury liquid and depth of flavour.
Cornflour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, lightly body-rich soup when heated.

The step that matters

Stir in cornflour and bring to the boil. Cornflour must be stirred into melted butter and then liquid, and brought to a boil, for its starch to swell and thicken the soup. Stopping early leaves it thin or floury-tasting.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, turnip, celery, white pepper, lemon):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, turnip, celery, white pepper, lemon. 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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