Name: Noodles and Cheese
Ingredients: 1 cup noodles; salt; cheese sauce

Why it works: Cheese and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,987 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Noodles and Cheese

Ingredients

1 cup noodles
salt
cheese sauce

Directions

Cook the noodles in boiling salted water until tender, then drain in a colander.
Prepare a cheese sauce and combine it with the noodles.

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.

Cheese + saucetop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,987 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Noodles: Provide the starchy base that carries the sauce and gives the dish its body.
Cheese sauce: Supplies creaminess, richness and savoury flavour that coats the noodles.

“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.