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Macaroni Pudding

A baked macaroni custard made with butter, flour, onion, milk, eggs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Macaroni Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the macaroni

  1. Break macaroni into small pieces and boil in salted water until tender.

  2. Run cold water over the macaroni, then drain in a colander.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in a pan, add flour and chopped onion, and cook until light yellow.

  2. Stir in milk until smooth, then add eggs, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and macaroni.

Bake and serve

  1. Fill a pudding dish with the mixture and place it in a kettle of boiling water.

  2. Boil for 15 minutes or 1 hour in a Caloric oven using both radiators.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 pudding and gives it a tender, starchy body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce base and carries flavour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and onion mixture so the milk sauce becomes smooth and body-rich.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a custard-like sauce.
Eggs
Set when heated, binding the pudding into a firm, sliceable custard.

The step that matters

Stir the milk into the flour mixture until smooth. Adding liquid to a hot flour and fat mixture can form lumps if not stirred steadily; the starch must be evenly dispersed before it thickens.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, milk, egg, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, egg, pepper, nutmeg. 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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