Name: Macaroni with Cream Sauce
Ingredients: 2 cups macaroni; 1 cup cream sauce

Why it works: Cream and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,787 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Macaroni with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

2 cups macaroni
1 cup cream sauce

Directions

Prepare

Cook the macaroni according to the instructions for Macaroni with Tomato Sauce until tender.
Drain the macaroni well.

Serve

Reheat the macaroni in 1 cup of cream sauce. 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.

Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,787 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

Macaroni: Forms the bulk of the dish and gives it its chewy, tender body.
Cream sauce: Adds moisture and richness, coating the macaroni and keeping it creamy when reheated.

“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.