Boil macaroni in salted water until tender. Drain. Then heat 2 tablespoonfuls of butter in a saucepan; add the macaroni, ½ cup of chopped boiled tongue, ½ cup of chopped mushrooms, ½ cup of grated cheese. Cover, let get very hot. Then mix a highly seasoned tomato-sauce with a small glass of wine; let boil up and pour over the macaroni. Serve hot with roast veal.
A late-Victorian-style pasta dish written for cooks who already knew how much macaroni to boil. The quantities of pasta, sauce and wine are all left to judgement, so fix those first.
- Quantities to assumeThe half-cup fillings suit about 8 oz (225 g) of dry macaroni, which serves four as a side or three as a main. Figure on roughly 1 to 1½ cups of tomato sauce so the dish is coated rather than swimming.
- A small glass of wineProbably a wineglassful, conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz (4 tablespoons): a splash, not a modern 6 oz pour. Red or dry white both work; add it to the sauce and let it boil a minute or two so the raw alcohol edge cooks off.
- Cook the macaroni shortPeriod instructions for boiling macaroni often ran to twenty minutes or more, so 'until tender' may well have meant genuinely soft. Drain at the firm end of the package time instead; the pasta finishes in the hot butter and sauce and will soften further.
- Boiled tongueBeef tongue is still sold at butchers and Latin and Eastern European markets, but it needs simmering for 2½ to 3 hours and peeling while warm. Chopped ham, mortadella or good salami substitutes directly at the same half-cup.
- The mushrooms need cookingThe mushrooms -- the recipe does not say whether they are raw or already cooked. If raw, they will release water into the butter and dilute everything; sauté them separately until browned and dry, then fold them in.
- The cheese'grated cheese' in an Italian-titled recipe of this era is most likely Parmesan or a similar hard grating cheese, though the book does not specify. Half a cup grated is roughly 1½ to 1¾ oz. Keep the heat moderate once it goes in so it melts rather than seizing into strings.
- "Highly seasoned"The tomato sauce carries the dish. Build it with garlic, onion, bay and a good deal of black pepper, and reduce it until it coats a spoon before the wine goes in.
- ServingThe recipe directs pouring the sauce over rather than tossing it through, and it looks better in a shallow dish. The suggested roast veal makes it a side; on its own it is a supper dish.
This belongs to the era when "Italian" on an American or British menu meant macaroni, tomato and grated cheese in some combination, before regional Italian cooking was widely understood outside Italian households. The book's format — one dish for every day of the year, each pinned to a nation — is visible in the surrounding entries, and seems to have been a way of offering variety without unfamiliar technique. The chopped tongue looks like the giveaway that this is a household economy dish as much as a foreign one: boiled tongue was a standard cold-larder item, and using up its trimmings would have been a natural thrift. The wine in the tomato sauce and the pairing with roast veal may suggest the French-influenced service associated with formal cooking then, whatever the dish was called.