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Macaroni and Cheese
Boil three-quarters of a pound of macaroni in water. Make a sauce by boiling an ounce and a half of flour, a pint and a half of milk, and three ounces of butter together. Stir in half a pound of grated cheese and let it dissolve, then add the macaroni. Season, and when well mixed pour into a deep baking-dish or cake-tin, sprinkle with a little more cheese, and brown it before the fire or in the oven. Pin a clean napkin round, and serve at once. Probable cost, 3d. or 4d. per pound.
A plain Victorian macaroni cheese, built on an all-in-one white sauce rather than a cooked roux. The proportions are generous with liquid, which is deliberate: the pasta goes into the dish underdone and drinks the rest.
- The sauce is the hingeFlour, milk and butter are boiled together with no preliminary roux, so the flour will settle and catch unless it is whisked hard from cold and kept moving until it thickens. Bring it up slowly and give it two or three minutes at a simmer to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Imperial measuresA pint and a half here is 30 imperial fl oz, roughly 850 ml or about 3 1/2 US cups — noticeably more than an American pint and a half. With only 1 1/2 oz of flour the sauce stays thin, which is correct for a dish that will finish absorbing liquid under heat.
- Macaroni quantitiesThree-quarters of a pound is 12 oz dry, feeding four to six as a supper dish. Victorian macaroni was often long tubes broken into lengths; short elbows behave the same way.
- Boil it shortThe macaroni goes on to be baked and browned, so stop it two minutes shy of the package time. Salt the water — the recipe seasons only at the end, and unsalted pasta in a salted sauce tastes flat.
- The cheeseThe recipe does not name a cheese; a dry hard English cheese such as Cheshire or Cheddar is the likely intention, and Parmesan was often used for the top. Take the pan off direct heat before stirring it in; boiled cheese separates into oil and strings.
- "Brown it before the fire"That means a hot open hearth or a salamander — the modern equivalent is a broiler or grill on high for three or four minutes. In the oven, 425F for ten to fifteen minutes will colour the top without drying the interior.
- The napkinPinning a folded linen napkin round the baking dish was standard service for a hot dish sent straight from the oven to the table, giving a hand-hold and dressing up a plain tin; purely presentational now.
- The costing"3d. or 4d. per pound" is three or four pence in pre-decimal currency, quoted per pound of finished dish. Cassell's gave these figures throughout so a household could compare dishes; they are useless as a modern price but tell you the dish was pitched as cheap.
Macaroni reached British tables well before it reached British kitchens: eighteenth-century travellers brought a taste for it back from Italy, and the word macaroni was current slang for a young man affecting continental manners long before macaroni cheese was a nursery standby. Baked dishes of macaroni with butter and grated cheese appear in English cookery books from the later 1700s onward, generally using Parmesan; by the time Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the later nineteenth century, the Parmesan had largely given way to cheaper English cheese and the dish had settled into its role as thrifty, filling and respectable. The costing appended here — a few pence a pound — is the point of its inclusion. Cassell's was written for households counting shillings, and a dish that turned flour, milk and a hard cheese end into a hot supper for a family was exactly what such a book existed to supply.