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Macaroni Custard
Boil two ounces of macaroni in a pint of milk until the pipes are swelled to their utmost size without breaking. Season with cinnamon and a few drops of lemon-juice. Lay them on a custard dish, and pour a custard over them hot. Serve cold.
A short entry that assumes you already know how to make a boiled custard, since the book gives one elsewhere. The whole dish hinges on two things: cooking the macaroni slowly enough in milk that it swells without splitting, and not letting the custard boil once it goes over.
- The macaroni"Pipes" means the long hollow tubes of the period, not elbows or short cut macaroni. Break them into 2-3 inch lengths or leave whole and coil them into the pan; the larger tubes hold their shape better than modern small shapes.
- Cooking in milk, not waterTwo ounces of macaroni to a pint (about 570 ml) of milk is a lot of liquid for a little pasta; the tubes swell in it and the surplus is drained off later. Use a heavy pan over low heat, stir often, and start checking at around 15 minutes; milk scorches on the bottom the moment you stop paying attention.
- The custard the recipe does not giveA period "custard" for pouring runs to something like 3-4 egg yolks (or 2 whole eggs) and about an ounce of sugar to each half pint of milk or cream, stirred over low heat until it coats a spoon. In modern terms that is roughly 170-175F; much hotter and it curdles, and this dish gives you no baking stage in which to recover.
- Cinnamon and lemonInfuse a broken cinnamon stick in the milk with the macaroni and fish it out, rather than stirring in ground cinnamon, which will cloud the dish. The lemon juice is a few drops only, added at the end for lift; more than that, added to hot dairy, will curdle both the milk and the custard.
- SugarNone is specified here; the sweetening is presumably left to the custard. Sweeten the custard, not the macaroni milk, or you will encourage scorching.
- Assembly and settingDrain the macaroni of any loose milk, lay it in the serving dish, and pour the hot custard over so it seeps between the tubes. It thickens as it cools; chill at least two hours before serving. It is a spooned dessert, not a sliceable pudding.
- YieldEnough for three or four as written. Best eaten the day it is made.
Macaroni appears in English kitchens as a sweet as well as a savoury: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookery books treat it as a starch to be simmered in milk with sugar, cinnamon and lemon peel, in the same family as rice pudding, semolina and vermicelli pudding. Cassell's treatment is really a demonstration piece for two techniques the book teaches separately, boiling a farinaceous food in milk until swollen and making a pouring custard, combined into something a household could serve cold in warm weather. The interest in the pasta swelling "to their utmost size without breaking" reflects a period when macaroni was bought loose, varied in quality, and was often judged by how well it held its tube.</p>