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Macaroni Pudding, Plain
Butter a pie-dish, and cover the bottom with about two and a half ounces of uncooked macaroni. Pour over it one quart of cold milk made sweet. Stir in a couple of well-beaten eggs, and flavour with any essence liked, ratafia or vanilla. Put bits of butter over the top, and a little grated nutmeg. Bake in a slow oven for three hours. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A baked milk pudding in which the pasta cooks entirely in the custard, so the ratio of liquid to macaroni is the whole recipe. Two points need attention before you start: the sugar is unmeasured, and the oven must genuinely be low.
- "Made sweet"No quantity is given, which is normal for Victorian milk puddings where sweetness was a matter of household taste. Two to three tablespoons of sugar per quart is a fair starting point; dissolve it in the cold milk before it goes over the macaroni.
- The quartAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 4 3/4 US cups. Using a US quart (32 fl oz) with the same 2 1/2 oz of macaroni will give a stiff, dry pudding, since the pasta absorbs a great deal as it bakes.
- Slow ovenA slow oven is generally taken as somewhere around 275-300F. The dish is an egg custard with pasta in it; too hot and the eggs tighten and weep, and you get curds in a watery pool rather than a set cream.
- Three hours is not a misprintThe long bake is what softens raw macaroni in barely-simmering milk. It is done when a knife inserted at the centre comes out clean and the top is freckled brown; the middle may still wobble slightly and will firm as it cools.
- The macaroniVictorian macaroni was usually sold in long tubes, snapped to fit the dish. Any short dried tube works, but avoid quick-cooking or very thin shapes, which disintegrate over three hours.
- Ratafia essenceAn almond-flavoured flavouring, historically built on bitter almond or peach kernel. Modern almond extract is the direct replacement; use no more than half a teaspoon for this quantity, as it dominates quickly.
- Vessel and yieldA shallow buttered pie-dish of about 2 quarts capacity, so the milk sits no more than an inch or so deep and the skin browns. Serves four or five, as stated, and is better warm than hot.
- The cost note8d is Victorian pence and has no useful modern equivalent; costings of this kind appear throughout the book, apparently to let dishes be compared against one another rather than against today's prices.
Macaroni came into British kitchens as a luxury import and left them as a nursery food. By the later nineteenth century dried pasta was cheap and widely sold, and it slotted straight into the existing family of baked milk puddings alongside rice, sago, tapioca and vermicelli — all built on the same frame of starch, sweetened milk, egg, butter and nutmeg. The word "Plain" in the title is doing real work: the plain version is costed at eightpence and meant for everyday. Ratafia, offered here as an alternative flavouring, was the standard almond note of the period, and grated nutmeg over the top of a baked custard was so nearly universal as to be taken for granted.