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MACARONI (a la Reine)
Boil half a pound of pipe macaroni (see MACARONI, BOILED, A L'ITALIENNE). Meanwhile, warm slowly in a stewpan three-quarters of a pint of cream, and slice into it half a pound of Stilton or other white cheese, add two ounces of good fresh butter, two blades of mace, pounded, a good pinch of cayenne, and a little salt. Stir round the pan until the cheese is melted, and the whole is mixed and hot and free from lumps, or put the macaroni on a hot dish, and pour the sauce over. It may be covered with fried bread-crumbs of a pale colour, and dried in a Dutch oven. Time, about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 5d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A cream-and-cheese macaroni from the era before roux-based sauces took over the dish. It comes together quickly once the pasta is on, and the only real difficulty is keeping the sauce from breaking.
- Never let the sauce boilCream and cheese held over direct heat will separate into oil and grains. Warm the cream gently, add the cheese off a bare simmer, and stir only until it is smooth and steaming.
- Stilton, but the white kind"Stilton or other white cheese" most likely points to white Stilton, the young unblued cheese, rather than the veined blue sold under the name today. Blue Stilton will work but gives a much more assertive dish; a mild Cheshire, Lancashire or Caerphilly is closer to the intent.
- Cream quantityThree-quarters of an imperial pint is 15 fl oz, about 1¾ US cups. Use double or heavy cream; single cream is likelier to split.
- Pipe macaroniThe long hollow tubes sold in the nineteenth century, snapped into lengths. Any large tubular pasta — bucatini, ziti, rigatoni — stands in. Half a pound dry is right for the quantity of sauce.
- Blades of maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg, sold in curled "blades." Two blades pounded is a small quantity — somewhere in the region of a quarter to a half teaspoon of ground mace, or a similar quantity of freshly grated nutmeg.
- A garbled lineThe printed text runs the two finishing options together and loses one of them. The sense is: either stir the drained macaroni into the sauce in the pan, or put the macaroni on a hot dish and pour the sauce over.
- The Dutch ovenHere a tin reflector set before an open fire, used to brown and dry the crumb topping. A hot oven for a few minutes, or a short spell under the broiler, does the same. Watch it — the crumbs are already fried and colour fast.
- Time and yieldThree-quarters of an hour covers bringing water to the boil, cooking the pasta and making the sauce. Half a pound of macaroni stretched to seven or eight portions implies small servings, which suggests a savoury or supper course rather than a main.
Macaroni reached English tables as a luxury import and stayed faintly aristocratic well into the nineteenth century — the eighteenth-century "macaroni" as a name for a foppish young man who had travelled to Italy is a reminder of how exotic the stuff once was. Dishes labelled à la reine in Victorian cookery books are often taken to signal a chicken-based or otherwise "royal" enrichment, as against a leaner or more rustic treatment. What is notable here is the absence of a flour-thickened béchamel, which by the end of the century had become the standard base for macaroni cheese in Britain. This older method leans entirely on cream reducing slightly and cheese emulsifying into it, seasoned with mace and cayenne — a spicing pair that points back to eighteenth-century English cookery rather than forward to the mild nursery macaroni of the twentieth.