Skip to main content
Main

Macaroni and Bacon

A simple pasta dish of macaroni cooked with bacon, butter, and seasoned stock, finished with pepper and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Macaroni and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the bacon into small pieces.

  2. Wash the macaroni and break it up.

Cook the macaroni

  1. Boil the macaroni in water with a lump of butter for 20 minutes.

  2. Drain the macaroni and pour in the seasoned stock.

  3. Boil until tender but not broken.

Finish and serve

  1. Toss with pepper, salt, and chopped bacon.

  2. Serve on a hot dish.

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 + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni
Forms the bulk of the dish and gives it its starchy, chewy structure.
Bacon
Adds salty, savoury flavour and fat that coats the pasta.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth fattiness to the cooking water and pasta.
Seasoned stock
Adds moisture and savoury flavour as the macaroni absorbs it.

The step that matters

Boil until tender but not broken. Pasta keeps cooking from residual heat after draining, and over-boiling breaks down its starch structure, leaving it soft and mushy. Testing it early keeps the macaroni firm to the bite.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes