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Bacon and Macaroni

A simple dish of macaroni cooked with bacon, stock, butter, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Bacon and Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Break the macaroni into small pieces.

  2. Boil the macaroni in slightly salted water for 5 minutes. Drain the macaroni well.

  3. Bring the stock to a boil.

  4. Add the macaroni to the stock and stew until tender but not too soft.

Fry the bacon and finish

  1. Cut the bacon into small dice.

  2. Fry the bacon in a sauté pan until slightly cooked.

  3. Add the drained macaroni, butter, nutmeg, salt, and pepper to the bacon.

  4. Stir gently over the heat until the macaroni is nicely browned.

  5. Serve hot.

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. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  2. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. 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 absorbs stock, giving it a tender, starchy body.
Streaky bacon
Adds fat and salty, savoury flavour that carries into the pasta as it fries.
Stock
Cooks the macaroni and gives it savoury flavour as it is absorbed.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the macaroni brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Stir gently over the heat until the macaroni is nicely browned. Once the macaroni is drained and added to the hot bacon fat, it can scorch before it browns evenly. Gentle, steady stirring spreads the heat and fat so the surface colours without burning, while the inside stays tender.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper. 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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