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Macaroni, Pate Of
Boil six or eight ounces of macaroni in good veal broth, drain, and cut it into equal lengths of two inches. Cover the bottom of a pie-dish with macaroni, and on this lay a quenelle of forcemeat or ham-balls, if preferred, placed equally with any kind of poultry or game, boned and in fillets, sweetbreads, cockscombs, or ox-palates, previously stewed with truffles or mushrooms, and minced. Put these with alternate layers of the macaroni and meat, and an equal quantity of cream and rich gravy to fill the dish. Bake with a crust over the top, or without a crust; make hot and brown before the fire. Parmesan cheese should accompany this dish, or it may be mixed with the macaroni. Time, fifteen minutes to swell the macaroni; to bake, half an hour. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
MACARONI, PATE OF (another way). (See PATE OF MACARONI.)
A Victorian assembly dish rather than a cooked-from-scratch one: everything but the pasta goes in already cooked, and the half hour in the oven only marries it. The instruction that matters is that the macaroni absorbs broth, so undercook it and season the liquid generously.
- The macaroniThis means long, straight, thick-walled tubes, not elbows; that is why it is cut into two-inch lengths after boiling. Boil in broth only until barely pliable, around 6 to 8 minutes for modern dried pasta rather than the fifteen given here, since it will keep swelling in the cream and gravy in the oven.
- Veal brothA mild, gelatinous stock is the point, not veal specifically. A light chicken stock, or chicken stock with a little pork or veal bone added, does the same job; a strong beef stock will overwhelm the dish.
- Quenelle of forcemeatA quenelle here is a poached dumpling of finely pounded meat or poultry bound with egg and cream, shaped between two spoons and poached in stock until firm. The ham-balls offered as the alternative are the same idea with minced cooked ham.
- Cockscombs and ox-palatesBoth were standard garnish meats in the nineteenth century and are effectively unobtainable now outside specialist butchers. Sweetbreads can still be ordered; if none of these appeal, boned fillets of chicken thigh, guinea fowl or pheasant carry the dish perfectly well.
- Everything goes in cookedThe sweetbreads, cockscombs and ox-palates are 'previously stewed' with truffle or mushroom; the wording leaves it unclear whether the boned poultry and game fillets are meant to be pre-cooked too. Thirty minutes in the oven will not cook raw poultry through in the middle of a packed dish, so poach or braise it first.
- The liquid"An equal quantity of cream and rich gravy to fill the dish" is about 250 ml each for a standard 1.5 litre pie dish. The gravy should be a reduced, well-seasoned brown stock; thin gravy plus cream will break into a greasy pool.
- Oven and finishThe book gives no temperature; 180C/350F for the half hour stated works. 'Make hot and brown before the fire' is the crustless version finished under an overhead heat source, so use the grill or broiler for two or three minutes.
- The crustThe recipe specifies only a crust over the top, not what kind; a single lid of short or puff pastry suits it. The book allows half an hour, though a pastry lid may want longer and a hotter oven to colour properly.
- YieldThe original claim of seven or eight is fair as a course in a long dinner. As a main dish it feeds four to five.
Baked macaroni pies of this kind sat at the grand end of Victorian pasta cookery, a long way from the plain macaroni cheese in the same books. The model is Italian and French: the timballo or pâté de macaroni, a lined or crusted mould of pasta packed with forcemeat, giblets, sweetbreads and truffle, which English cooks encountered through French professional kitchens and reproduced for dinner-party service. The list of fillings here — cockscombs, ox-palates, sweetbreads, boned game in fillets — is a good index of what a well-supplied nineteenth-century larder actually held, and of how thoroughly those cuts have since dropped out of British and American cooking. The dish closes with a cross-reference, sending the reader to the same preparation under another name.