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Macaroni with Tomato Sauce
Cook one cup macaroni, broken in inch pieces, in boiling salted water twenty minutes. Drain, and pour over cold water to separate pieces. Mix with one and one-half cups Tomato Sauce. Add one-half cup grated cheese. Turn into a buttered baking dish, cover with buttered crumbs, bake twenty minutes in a hot oven.
A straightforward baked macaroni, but the pasta timing and the vague oven direction both need translating.
- "A hot oven"In period usage that is usually reckoned somewhere around 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat is enough to brown the crumb topping and heat the dish through, since everything going in is already cooked.
- Twenty minutes' boilingFar longer than modern macaroni needs, and in line with the period habit of boiling pasta soft. Modern elbow or broken tube macaroni is done in 7-9 minutes; boil it to the firm end of the package time, since it will bake again.
- The cold-water rinseRinsing is deliberate here, not sloppiness. It stops the cooking and strips surface starch so the pieces stay separate in the sauce rather than setting into a paste.
- Buttered crumbsFresh soft breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a cup of crumbs to two tablespoons butter. Dry commercial crumbs will brown too fast and turn sandy.
- The cheeseA firm grating cheese is meant, such as a dry factory cheddar or a Parmesan. Half a cup grated is about 2 oz.
- Tomato sauceThe book means its own tomato sauce recipe, which in this period would most likely have been a lightly thickened sauce rather than a long-simmered Italian sugo. A plain, lightly thickened tomato sauce is the right register; a chunky jarred marinara will loosen the dish.
- YieldOne cup of dry macaroni makes three or four modest side servings, two as a main course. It scales cleanly if doubled into a larger dish, though allow another five to ten minutes in the oven.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the era when macaroni had been thoroughly naturalized into American home cooking. Thomas Jefferson is often credited with popularizing the noodle among the American elite after his time in Europe, and by the late nineteenth century it was inexpensive, shelf-stable and firmly domestic, and cookbooks routinely treated it the way they treated rice: something to be boiled soft, bound with a white or tomato sauce, capped with buttered crumbs and baked. The recipe assumes you already have a cup and a half of tomato sauce standing by.