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Macaroni Pie
Boil four ounces of macaroni in veal broth or beef bouillon, put part of it over the bottom of a pie-dish, and cover sparingly with grated cheese and an ounce of butter in small bits. Mince a shallot finely, and a few mushrooms; mix some salt, a blade of mace, pounded, a little pepper, and a small pinch of cayenne. Season a pound and a half of steak with these ingredients. Cut it from the fillet small and thin; lay the steaks alternately with the macaroni into the dish, covering with macaroni and grated cheese. Run clarified butter over the top, and bake in a slow oven for an hour. Probable cost of beef, 1s. 4d. per pound. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A layered bake of macaroni and thin-cut beef, closer to a Victorian pudding than to a modern pasta casserole. Most of the adjustment needed is in the oven setting and the pasta itself.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300-325F. An hour at that heat is what keeps the thin fillet slices from seizing up; a hotter oven will dry the top layer of macaroni to leather before the beef is done.
- Cook the macaroni shortBoil it in the broth only until barely pliable, several minutes less than the package time. It will soften further during the hour in the oven, and fully cooked pasta going in risks coming out mushy.
- The macaroni of the periodVictorian macaroni was long, fairly thick tube pasta, broken into lengths rather than the short elbows sold now. Either works; long tubes cut into two-inch pieces give the layered effect the recipe assumes. Four ounces is about 1 cup dry of elbows.
- Broth is not optionalBoiling the pasta in veal broth or beef bouillon is the seasoning backbone of the dish, since no other liquid is added. Use a well-salted stock; water gives a notably flat result.
- Blade of maceA blade is one piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg. Pounded, it comes to roughly a scant 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace, which is a fair substitute.
- Cutting the beef"Cut it from the fillet small and thin" points to thin slices of tenderloin, on the order of 1/8 inch, cut small enough to lie flat in the dish. Thick chunks will still be underdone in the centre when the pasta above them has overbaked.
- The cheeseGrated cheese here means a hard, dry cheese for grating: Parmesan or an aged Cheshire or Cheddar. Use it sparingly as directed, so the layers do not turn greasy under the clarified butter.
- Cover, then uncoverThere is no sauce and no added liquid, so bake covered with foil for the first 40 minutes and finish uncovered to brown the top. Otherwise the exposed macaroni hardens.
- Yield and costThree to four servings, as stated. The "1s. 4d. per pound" for beef is a price note for a 19th-century British household, not an instruction.
Cassell's placed this among its instructional entries at a moment when macaroni had shifted, in British cooking, from a fashionable Italian import towards an ordinary storecupboard staple. Eighteenth-century English cooks had met it mainly as a sweet or a cheese dish for the wealthy; by the later nineteenth century it was cheap, dry, keepable and widely sold, and cookery books of the period did layer it with beefsteak and bake it in pie dishes. The construction, alternating layers sealed with clarified butter and baked slowly in a deep dish, belongs to the British pie and pudding tradition rather than to anything Italian; the same logic produced beefsteak pies and layered potato bakes. The published cost per pound is a reminder of the book's purpose: it was a reference work for a household manager who needed to know what dinner would cost before deciding to make it.