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Curried Maccaroni

A macaroni dish simmered in a curry-flavored sauce with stock, arrowroot, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Curried Maccaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Cook the macaroni in slightly salted water with a small bit of butter until tender, about 15 minutes.

  2. Drain the macaroni and set aside.

Make the curry sauce

  1. In a pot, mix the stock or gravy with curry powder and arrowroot, and boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Stir in the cream or béchamel just before adding the macaroni.

  3. Gently heat the macaroni in the curry sauce until well coated.

  4. Add lemon juice after mixing in the macaroni.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Beef + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together155 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Ribband macaroni
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the sauce as it heats.
Beef or veal stock or gravy
Provides the savoury liquid base that becomes the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the dominant spiced aroma and flavour of the dish.
Arrowroot
Thickens the stock so the sauce clings to the macaroni.
Cream or béchamel
Adds richness and a smoother, creamier texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the curry sauce. Arrowroot thickens only when the liquid is hot enough, and curry powder needs sustained heat to release its flavour. Boiling for the full time ensures the sauce is properly thickened and the spices are cooked through before the cream is added.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, lemon, cream, butter):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, lemon, cream, butter. 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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