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Macaroni and Ham
Mince half a pound of ham finely, season it with pepper and chopped parsley, put a layer at the bottom of a pie-dish, then one of cold boiled macaroni cut into inch lengths, on which sprinkle a little chopped onion, add an ounce of butter in small pieces. Then put more ham and more macaroni in layers; sprinkle with bread-crumbs, add more butter and a wine-glassful of white sauce, and bake for eight minutes in a fairly hot oven.
A layered bake for leftover ham and cooked macaroni, written for a cook who already had both in the larder. The original quantities are workable; the timing is not.
- Eight minutes is not enoughEverything here is already cooked, so the bake is only meant to heat through and brown the crumbs. Eight minutes will not do that from cold in a domestic oven — allow 20 to 25 minutes, or until the top is coloured and the sauce bubbles at the edge.
- "Fairly hot oven"Read this as 400-425F (200-220C). At that heat the crumbs colour before the ham dries out.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian and Edwardian cookery books a wine-glass is about 2 fl oz, so roughly a quarter cup of white sauce. That is a moderate amount by design; the dish is meant to be bound, not swimming. If your macaroni is dry, a scant half cup does no harm.
- Macaroni cut into inch lengthsMacaroni was commonly sold at this date as long straight tubes, which is why the recipe has you cut it. Modern elbow macaroni needs no cutting; cook it to just tender, since it gets no further softening in the oven.
- The white sauceA plain béchamel — about 1 tablespoon each butter and flour to a scant cup of milk, seasoned. Make it slightly thinner than you would for coating, as the crumbs and macaroni will absorb some.
- SaltThere is no salt in the recipe, and rightly so: cured ham, butter and a seasoned sauce carry it. Taste the sauce before assembling rather than salting the layers.
- The pie-dishA shallow dish is better than a deep one here — more crumb surface to brown, and the heat reaches the centre more quickly. Butter it before the first ham layer or the bottom will stick.
- YieldHalf a pound of ham with the macaroni fills a small 1-quart dish and serves three as a light supper, or four with a salad.
Cassell's belonged to the great age of the ham-and-macaroni supper dish, when both components were things a household expected to have left over: a boiled or baked ham working its way through the week, and macaroni bought dry by the pound as an inexpensive, keeping staple. Italian macaroni had been familiar in British kitchens since the eighteenth century, though it was long treated as a vehicle for cheese, butter and cream rather than for tomato, and by the late Victorian period recipes like this one had absorbed it fully into the English repertoire of layered pie-dish bakes finished with breadcrumbs. The very short baking time suggests this is a reheating recipe rather than a cooking one — the sort of instruction that seems to assume a cook who was assembling rather than starting from scratch.