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Noodles and Cheese

A simple dish of cooked noodles tossed with cheese sauce, optionally mixed with potatoes or rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cheese and potato work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 959 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Noodles and Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the noodles in boiling salted water until tender, then drain in a colander.

  2. Prepare a cheese sauce and mix it with the cooked 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.

  1. Cheese + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together959 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Cheese + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sauce + potatotop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,073 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
Form the main body of the dish, giving it a starchy, chewy bite.
Cheese sauce
Adds richness and fat, coating the noodles to make them creamy and savory.

Swap the potato

The recipe marks potato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, sauce):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, sauce. 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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