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Macaroni with Tomato Sauce

A simple macaroni dish cooked in boiling water and served with a tomato sauce made from butter, flour, tomato juice, salt, pepper, and optional sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Macaroni with Tomato Sauce

Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Macaroni with Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Break the macaroni into 1‑inch pieces.

  2. Bring 6 cups of boiling water to a boil.

  3. Add 1‑2 tablespoons of salt to the boiling water.

  4. Add the macaroni and cook until tender, about 20 to 45 minutes.

  5. Drain the macaroni.

  6. Mix the drained macaroni with 1 cup of tomato sauce.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in 2 tablespoons of flour until well blended.

  3. Pour in 1 cup of strained tomato juice and stir until it boils and thickens.

  4. Add 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1/2 teaspoon of pepper, and sugar if the tomatoes are sour.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 dish and gives it its chewy, tender structure when cooked.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, and helps form the base of the thickened sauce.
Flour
Thickens the tomato juice into a smooth sauce when cooked with the melted butter.
Tomato juice
Supplies the liquid and tomato flavor that becomes the thickened sauce.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the tomatoes when they taste sour.

The step that matters

Pour in 1 cup of strained tomato juice and stir until it boils and thickens.. Flour must be cooked with the fat and liquid until the mixture boils so the starch swells and thickens the sauce. Stopping early leaves a thin sauce with a raw flour taste.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, butter, flour, pepper, sugar. 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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