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Macaroni, Brown
To a quarter of a pound of macaroni that has been boiled for ten minutes and drained from the water, add the following:--Half a teaspoonful of flour mixed with half a pint of the water from the macaroni, a little salt, pepper, and a tea-spoonful of any good store sauce (omitted for an invalid); simmer till the macaroni is soft and has absorbed the liquid, i.e. about half an hour to forty minutes, varying with the macaroni. Towards the end of the cooking add a dessert-spoonful of Bovril and a little browning to deepen the colour.
A savoury macaroni cooked risotto-fashion in a thickened beef-extract broth rather than boiled and sauced. The method depends on old-style macaroni that could stand a long simmer; that is the first thing to reckon with.
- The hinge: macaroni has changedNineteenth-century dried macaroni was a coarse, slow-cooking pasta that could absorb liquid for forty minutes without collapsing. Modern extruded dried macaroni is soft in 8-10 minutes and will turn to paste on this timetable. Judge by the pasta, not the clock, and expect the absorption stage to take a fraction of the time given.
- QuantitiesA quarter of a pound is about 115 g of dry macaroni, serving two as a side or one as a light supper. Half an Imperial pint of the cooking water is 10 fl oz, a scant 300 ml.
- Store sauce"Store sauce" means any bottled savoury condiment kept in the house — Worcestershire, mushroom ketchup, Harvey's sauce. A teaspoon of Worcestershire is the closest modern stand-in. The instruction to omit it for an invalid reflects the period view that spiced sauces irritated a delicate stomach.
- BovrilStill sold, and still the right ingredient: a salty beef extract paste. A dessertspoonful is two teaspoons. Add it off the strongest heat and taste before adding any further salt, since both the Bovril and the store sauce are already salty.
- BrowningGravy browning was burnt-sugar caramel colouring sold by the bottle, used purely for colour. Modern gravy browning or a few drops of dark soy will do the same job, and the dish is no worse for leaving it out.
- The flourHalf a teaspoon of flour in 300 ml of liquid is a very light binding, enough to give the absorbed liquid a little body rather than to make a sauce. Whisk it into cold or barely warm cooking water first or it will lump.
- FinishingThe dish is meant to end dry-ish, with the pasta having taken up nearly all the liquid. If it looks soupy, let it reduce uncovered; if it tightens too fast, loosen with more of the reserved cooking water.
This sits close to the tradition of British invalid and convalescent cookery, which is presumably why the recipe pauses to tell you what to leave out for a sick person — though the dish as written is a general one, with the invalid version only a variant. Macaroni was valued in that context as a bland, easily digested starch, and Bovril — a concentrated beef extract that grew out of John Lawson Johnston's Fluid Beef and took the Bovril name in the mid-1880s, and which was heavily advertised as strengthening nourishment for the ill — supplied the savour and the supposed restorative virtue in one spoonful. The result is a thoroughly un-Italian treatment: no cheese, no tomato, the pasta simmered in flavoured liquid until it drinks it up, and coloured brown with caramel, a habit common in British cookery books of the period, which frequently call for browning to make a savoury dish look savoury.