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MACARONI (a la Creme)
Boil some macaroni in slightly salted water for about twenty minutes. Strain it, and replace in the saucepan for a few minutes with a small piece of butter. Then add, according to amount, one or two spoonfuls of thick cream, stir well, and dish up. If cheese is liked, it must be added before the cream, taking care to stir it well till the cheese becomes stringy.
A four-line dish that depends almost entirely on two things: not overcooking the pasta, and keeping the pan off high heat once the cream goes in. The Victorian twenty-minute boil is the one instruction to ignore.
- Twenty minutes is too longNineteenth-century macaroni was a thick, hard-dried tube meant to be boiled soft. Modern dried macaroni needs 8-10 minutes, or a minute short of the packet time if it is going back into a hot pan with butter.
- "Spoonfuls"Read this as tablespoons, the usual Victorian sense unless a teaspoon is specified. One or two tablespoons of cream to a serving or two of macaroni is a light coating, not a sauce; scale up if you want the pasta properly bound.
- Thick creamRead this as double or heavy cream, 36% fat or above. Single cream, half-and-half or anything labelled "light" will break or stay watery when it hits the hot pan.
- Cheese before cream, and whyCheese before cream -- The recipe gives no reason for the order, but it makes sense: the cheese melts into the butter and residual starch first, so the cream then loosens an already emulsified coating rather than being asked to hold melting fat on its own.
- Keep the heat low"Stringy" is the sign the cheese has melted and not yet split. Once it goes past that on high heat the fat separates and the sauce turns grainy. Work off the burner or over the barest flame.
- Which cheeseThe recipe does not say. A dry hard cheese suits it: Parmesan, or an aged Cheddar for a stronger dish. Grate it finely so it melts before the pan overheats. Allow roughly 1 oz per person.
- Save some pasta waterNot in the original, but the starchy water is the simplest correction if the cream tightens too far. A tablespoon or two brings it back.
- YieldAs written, a side dish for two to three. About 6 oz of dry macaroni, 1 oz butter, and the one or two spoonfuls of cream the recipe specifies; more if you want it properly sauced.
Macaroni reached English tables as an Italian luxury in the eighteenth century and had become thoroughly domesticated by the time Cassell's was compiled — the young men who affected Continental taste on the Grand Tour gave the language the "macaroni" of Yankee Doodle. By the late Victorian period it was cheap, imported dried in long tubes, and English cooks treated it much as they treated rice: boiled soft and served either sweetened with milk and sugar as a pudding, or savoury with cheese. This entry sits with the savoury school. The absence of flour is worth noting: the roux-based macaroni cheese familiar today is the other Victorian approach, and this cream version is the quicker, richer alternative.