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Macaroni Cheese
Wash half a pound of Naples macaroni, drain it, throw it into boiling water, and boil for twenty minutes. Pour the water off, and pour a pint of milk upon the macaroni, and let it simmer gently till tender but not pulpy. Grate two ounces of dry cheese. Put some of the macaroni, with the milk, on a hot greased dish; sprinkle pepper and salt and a few grains of cayenne upon it, together with a little of the grated cheese, and repeat the operation until the ingredients are all used. Sprinkle grated cheese and a spoonful of bread-raspings on the top of all, and pour over it half an ounce of melted butter. Brown in front of the fire or in a hot oven, and serve very hot.
A late-Victorian macaroni cheese with no roux and no white sauce — the milk the pasta finishes cooking in is the sauce. The result is looser and milkier than modern versions, and that is intentional.
- Naples macaroniLong, hollow, fairly thick tubes sold in straight lengths, snapped before cooking. Any decent bronze-cut rigatoni, penne or ziti substitutes; a ridged shape will hold the thin milk sauce best.
- Do not overcook in the waterTwenty minutes in water plus a milk simmer will reduce most modern dried pasta to mush. Boil for about half the time on the packet, then transfer to the milk to finish — the milk stage is where the starch thickens the dish.
- Washing the macaroniDried pasta of the period was often sold loose rather than packaged and could carry dust and flour, which probably explains the rinse. Skip it; you want the surface starch.
- "A hot oven"Around 425–450F. It is browning a dish that is already cooked, so it wants heat and speed, not a long bake. Ten to fifteen minutes at that temperature, or a few minutes under a broiler.
- Dry cheeseA hard, well-aged cheese — an old Cheshire or Cheddar, or Parmesan. Two ounces to half a pound of macaroni is restrained by modern standards; double it if you want a richer dish, but expect a looser sauce than a bechamel-based one.
- Bread-raspingsThe scraped crust of stale or twice-baked bread, used as a fine dry crumb. Dry breadcrumbs, or panko toasted lightly in a pan, do the same job.
- QuantitiesHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; a pint of milk in a British book of this date is 20 fl oz, so use 2½ cups. Add a splash more if the pasta drinks it all before turning tender.
- YieldServes three as a main course or four to six as a side.
Baked macaroni with cheese was well established in English cookery long before this book: Elizabeth Raffald gives a version in the eighteenth century, when macaroni was an expensive import associated with young men who had done the Grand Tour — the sense of "macaroni" as a flashy dandy comes from the same fashion. By the 1870s, when Cassell's was in print as a dictionary for middle-class households, dried pasta was cheap, factory-made and thoroughly domesticated, and it appears here as a plain economical supper dish rather than anything Italian. The absence of a flour-thickened sauce is worth noting: the pasta is simmered in milk until its own starch binds the liquid, rather than being bound with the roux-based sauce that later became standard in British and American kitchens.