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Bacon and Macaroni
Break four ounces of Italian macaroni into small pieces, and put into a saucepan of boiling water, slightly salted. Cook for five minutes, then drain and cool. Boil up half a pint of stock, skim, and add the macaroni, cook till quite tender but not pulpy. Slice four ounces of streaky bacon thinly, cut it into small dice, and fry a little in a saute-pan. Add the cooked macaroni and one ounce of butter, season with pepper, salt and nutmeg, and stir carefully over the fire until a nice brown. Turn on to a hot dish and serve. Probable cost, 6d.
A simple supper dish that stands or falls on the stock: the macaroni finishes by absorbing it, so use something you would be happy to drink.
- The hingeThe five-minute boil is only a par-cook. The pasta is meant to finish in the half pint (a scant 300 ml) of stock and drink most of it, which is where the flavour comes from. Do not drown it in more liquid or you will end up draining the dish away.
- Italian macaroniIn this period the name usually covered long, hollow tubes sold in straight lengths, which would explain the instruction to break it up. Any short tubular pasta works; treat the total boiling-plus-stock time as slightly under the packet time so it stays firm.
- Streaky baconBritish streaky bacon is the belly cut, close to American bacon but often less heavily smoked and cured. Pancetta is a workable substitute.
- Fry a littleMeans render the fat and colour the dice lightly, not crisp them. They carry on cooking with the macaroni afterwards and will otherwise turn hard.
- Saute-panA wide, straight-sided pan with enough surface area to brown rather than steam. A large frying pan does the job; a deep saucepan does not.
- SaltBacon and stock are both salted, and the pasta water is salted too. Season at the very end and taste first.
- NutmegFreshly grated, and a very small amount. It is there as a background note with the butter, as in a bechamel, not as a detectable spice.
- Yield and costFour ounces of pasta and four of bacon serve two as a light main course or four as a side. The sixpence is the book's own estimate of what the ingredients would cost when it was printed.
Cassell's ran Bacon and Macaroni among a run of cheap, filling macaroni dishes that became a fixture of Victorian household cookery. Macaroni had been an expensive imported luxury in Britain in the eighteenth century, a period whose 'macaroni' fashion for dandies is often linked to young men returning from the Grand Tour, but by the time this dictionary appeared it was a dried, storable, inexpensive staple sold by the pound from the grocer's, and the cookery books seem often to have treated it much as they treated rice or sago. What arguably marks the recipe as English rather than Italian is the method: the pasta is boiled briefly in water, then simmered in meat stock until it swells, and finally fried in bacon fat and butter until browned. Nutmeg with butter and bacon is the same seasoning logic that governs the period's macaroni cheese, and the printed price of sixpence shows the book's central purpose, which was to let a cook price a dish before deciding to make it.