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Macaroni and Mushrooms
Boil a quarter of a pound of macaroni in a pint and a half of water, with a little pepper and salt, for twenty minutes. Drain the macaroni, put it into a clean stewpan, pour a quarter of a pint of stock over it, with an ounce of butter and one of grated cheese. Stir over a gentle fire for five minutes, and turn on to a hot dish. Take the desired number of mushrooms, wash and skin them, cut them into slices, and put them into a stewpan with an ounce of butter and a little salt and pepper. Toss them over the fire for ten minutes, take them up, put them on the macaroni, and serve.
A plain Victorian supper dish that stands or falls on the mushrooms. Two adjustments matter most: the macaroni no longer needs twenty minutes, and the mushrooms should not be peeled.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pints are imperial: a pint and a half is 30 fl oz, roughly 3¾ US cups, and the quarter pint of stock is 5 fl oz (a gill), about ⅔ cup. A quarter pound of macaroni is 4 oz dry.
- Cooking time for the macaroniTwenty minutes suited the thick, long-cut macaroni pipes sold by weight in the nineteenth century. Modern dried elbow or short macaroni is done in 8–10 minutes; cook to the packet time, or a minute under, since it finishes in the stock.
- Cook it in more waterA pint and a half for 4 oz of pasta is tight by modern habit and the water will go starchy and gluey. Use a large pan of well-salted water and drain.
- Do not peel the mushroomsSkinning was standard Victorian practice, and particularly understandable with large open field caps and their tough, often gritty skins. Cultivated button and chestnut mushrooms need only a wipe, and washing them waterlogs the flesh, which then steams rather than browns.
- Salt the mushrooms lateSalting at the start of the ten minutes draws out water and the pan floods. Get the butter hot, add the sliced mushrooms in a single layer, let them colour, then season. Five to seven minutes in a wide pan gives better flavour than ten in a crowded one.
- The cheeseThe recipe does not name a variety; Parmesan or a hard dry Cheddar would both suit. Add it off direct heat or over the gentlest flame so it melts into the stock rather than seizing into strings.
- YieldFour ounces of macaroni serves two as a light supper or four as a small first course. Allow 6–8 oz of mushrooms for two.
Cassell's places this among a run of macaroni dishes, at a time when Italian dried pasta was well established in the British larder, imported and sold loose in long pipes, and here treated as a vehicle for stock, butter and cheese rather than for tomato. Commercial mushroom growing in cellars, disused quarries and under glass was expanding in the second half of the nineteenth century, though field-gathered caps in late summer and autumn, and the ketchup and powder made from them, remained important. The finish with stock rather than milk or cream marks it as a savoury of the kitchen rather than a nursery macaroni cheese.