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MACARONI (au Vin)
Boil two ounces of macaroni from twenty to thirty minutes. Drain on a sieve before the fire. Put into a stewpan two table-spoonfuls of thick cream, a lump of butter, and as much Parmesan, grated, as will make it, when melted, of the consistency of custard. Add the macaroni, and toss well in the pan together. Have ready a French roll that has been steeped in about a pint of wine--it should have been rasped so that no brown crust remains on it. Pour the macaroni hot over the roll, and brown with a salamander. Probable cost, 3d. or 4d.
A single-serving Victorian supper dish: macaroni in a Parmesan cream, poured over a wine-soaked roll and glazed. Two details need rethinking before you start — the pasta's cooking time and the sheer volume of wine.
- Boil the macaroni far lessTwenty to thirty minutes was normal when macaroni came in long, thick, slow-drying tubes and was expected to be soft throughout. Modern dried macaroni is done in 8-10 minutes; take it a minute short of al dente, since it will finish in the cheese sauce.
- "Drain on a sieve before the fire"This means dry the drained pasta in front of the open hearth so no water thins the sauce. A colander set over the warm pan off the heat for a minute does the same job.
- Parmesan by consistency, not weightThe instruction to add "as much as will make it of the consistency of custard" is the working measure. With two tablespoons of cream and a knob of butter, expect roughly 1 to 1.5 oz (30-40 g) finely grated Parmesan. Melt it over low heat — Parmesan seizes and turns grainy if the pan simmers.
- The rasped French rollRasping means grating the crust away with a file or coarse grater, leaving pale crumb that will absorb liquid. Any small crusty white roll works; slice off the crust if you have no rasp.
- A pint of wine is a soaking bath, not an ingredientA pint of wine is mostly a soaking bath -- The recipe says only that the roll is steeped in about a pint; it does not say what becomes of the wine the roll fails to absorb, so much of the pint is presumably left behind. An imperial pint is 20 fl oz. Half that amount in a shallow dish, turning the roll, wets it just as well. The recipe does not specify a wine; a medium-dry white or a sweetish sherry-style wine is one reasonable choice.
- Salamander means broilerA salamander was an iron plate heated red and held above the dish to glaze the top. Use an overhead grill or broiler at full heat for a minute or two, or a kitchen torch.
- YieldTwo ounces of macaroni and one roll is one generous portion, served as a savoury course or a light supper. Scale by the roll.
- "Probable cost, 3d. or 4d."Three or four old pence, from the pre-decimal system of twelve pence to the shilling. Cassell's costed almost every entry so a household could budget a whole menu at a glance.
Cassell's placed this among its many macaroni entries at a moment when Italian pasta had been thoroughly absorbed into English cooking but was still treated as a delicacy rather than a staple — dressed with cream and Parmesan. The wine-steeped roll belongs to a much older English and French habit of the sop: bread laid in the dish to catch a rich sauce, a practice that by the nineteenth century seems to have become much less common. Rasping, the scraping away of crust with a metal file, was routine work in Victorian kitchens, where bread was baked with a hard dark exterior that cooks removed before using the crumb for stuffings, puddings and crumbs. The salamander, an iron disc on a long handle heated in the fire, was the standard glazing tool before overhead gas grills; the name has since transferred to the commercial broiler still used in professional kitchens.