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Macaroni and Cheese
Boil macaroni until tender; butter the bottom of a pudding-dish, and put in a layer of macaroni, then a layer of grated cheese; season with butter, pepper and salt; then another layer of macaroni, and so on, finishing with a layer of cheese; cover with milk and bake forty minutes.
A baked macaroni with no sauce at all — the milk and cheese are meant to meet in the dish and thicken as it bakes. A few notes will keep it from turning out watery.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Forty minutes suggests a moderate oven, 350F. At that heat the milk sets around the starch released by the pasta; much hotter and it will curdle before it thickens.
- Undercook the macaroniPeriod recipes often boiled macaroni until quite soft, sometimes twenty minutes or more. Modern dried macaroni should come out firm, two or three minutes short of package time, since it keeps absorbing milk in the oven.
- How much milk"Cover with milk" means pour until the liquid just reaches the top layer of pasta and no further. Any more and it may not set.
- The cheeseA recipe of this kind most likely used a firm, dry, aged cheese of the American or English cheddar type. Use a sharp aged cheddar and grate it yourself; pre-shredded cheese is dusted with anti-caking starch that can go grainy in a milk bake.
- Butter between the layersThe dabs of butter add richness to a dish that has no sauce, and the recipe calls for them at every layer.
- Browning the topFinishing with cheese gives a crust, but forty minutes at moderate heat may not colour it; if it has not browned, run it briefly under the broiler.
- YieldPudding-dishes varied in size, but a dish of around 2 quarts would serve six as a side or four as a supper dish.
Baked macaroni with cheese was already an old English and American dish by the time this book appeared — it descends from the macaroni pies found in eighteenth-century English cookery, and Thomas Jefferson is often credited with helping popularise macaroni in the United States after his years abroad, though that story is repeated more often than it is documented. What makes this version tell its period is the method: no white sauce, no roux, just layers of pasta and grated cheese flooded with milk. White-sauce versions circulated alongside layered ones well before the turn of the century. Its placement here among sauces, salads and condiments rather than with the main dishes is also of its time; macaroni was often treated as a side or an accompaniment rather than the centre of a meal.