Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cheese, with Macaroni
Cheese, with Macaroni
Put a quarter of a pound of pipe macaroni into a saucepan with a little salt, and sufficient boiling milk and water to cover it. Let it boil until it is quite tender but firm, then put a layer of it into a well-buttered dish, and over that sprinkle some bread-crumbs and a mixture of Parmesan and Cheshire cheese. Place three or four lumps of butter on it, and repeat until the dish is full, being careful to have bread-crumbs at the top. Pour a little butter warmed, but not oiled, over the crumbs, and brown the preparation before a clear fire, or with a salamander, but do not put it in the oven, or it will taste of oil. Serve with salt and mustard. Riband macaroni may be used if preferred, and it will not require so much boiling. It may be boiled in water without the milk, and a little butter added instead. Time to boil the macaroni, about one hour and a half. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A gratin built in layers rather than bound in a sauce, and finished under direct top heat instead of in the oven. Two instructions in the original have been overtaken entirely: the boiling time and the ban on the oven.
- Ignore the hour and a halfVictorian pipe macaroni was thicker and drier than modern pasta, and long boiling times are common in period books, though an hour and a half is at the extreme end even for them. Modern dried macaroni is tender in 8-10 minutes; boil it a minute short of the package time so it survives the browning without turning to paste.
- Boiling in milk and waterThe original gives no proportions, only enough of the two together to cover the pasta. Milk scorches on a dry pan bottom, so keep the heat moderate and stir. Drain well before layering, or the finished dish will be soupy.
- A salamander is a broilerThe original salamander was an iron plate heated red and held over the food. Your grill or broiler element, preheated and the dish set 4-6 inches below, does the same job in 3-5 minutes. The recipe's only stated reason for banning the oven is that the dish "will taste of oil"; a hot oven will brown it if you prefer, at the cost of departing from the instruction.
- Cheshire cheeseA crumbly, salty, slightly acidic English cow's milk cheese. A young Lancashire or a sharp white cheddar is the closest easy substitute; keep the Parmesan, which is there for savour rather than melt.
- Butter warmed but not oiled"Oiled" means melted past the point where the emulsion breaks and the fat separates. Melt it gently and stop while it is still opaque and creamy, so it soaks the crumbs rather than running through them.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound is 4 oz (115 g) of dry macaroni. Stretched across four or five people this is a Victorian side dish or savoury course, not a main; double it if it is the centre of the meal.
- Riband macaroniThe flat ribbon shapes, closer to a broad fettuccine. As the text says, it cooks faster, and it layers more neatly than tubes.
- Serve with salt and mustardEnglish mustard at the table, not stirred in. It is the period's standard partner to melted cheese and worth keeping.
- Probable cost1s 8d, or twenty pence in pre-decimal money. Cassell's costed nearly every recipe so a housekeeper could budget a week of meals against a fixed allowance.
Macaroni reached English tables as a fashionable Italian import in the eighteenth century, when the young men who had made the Grand Tour and come home with continental tastes were mocked as "macaronis". By the time Cassell's was compiled it had settled into the ordinary repertoire, and this entry sits in the book's cheese section as a savoury rather than a pasta dish in any Italian sense. The layered, crumb-topped treatment here is one of two English forms that coexisted with the roux-bound macaroni cheese, which was already in print by the later eighteenth century in Raffald's 1769 book: the pasta is simply stacked with cheese and butter and browned on top. The instruction not to use the oven suggests that cooks preferred the clean radiant heat of the fire or the salamander for finishing a gratin.