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Macaroni, Savoury
Break two ounces of pipe macaroni into pieces an inch in length, and boil these in a quart of water in an uncovered saucepan for a quarter of an hour. Drain and return to the stewpan with a pint of well-flavoured stock, an onion chopped small, and a little pepper and salt. Simmer very gently by the side of the fire till the macaroni is quite tender but unbroken. Make a little custard with three-quarters of a pint of milk and two eggs. Put the macaroni in a greased dish, pour the custard over, and bake in a gentle oven till the custard is set and lightly browned. If liked, the macaroni may be plainly boiled till tender, then seasoned with salt and pepper, and served with a little maitre d'hotel sauce poured over it.
A Victorian macaroni bake that leans on stock and a savoury custard rather than cheese sauce. The whole dish hinges on not letting the custard boil.
- Gentle ovenBake at 300-325F. Any hotter and the egg custard curdles and weeps before it browns. A water bath is not called for but will help if your oven runs hot.
- Quantities and yieldTwo ounces of dry macaroni is about half a cup — this serves two as a side dish, or one as a light supper. Scale up in proportion if you want more, keeping the custard at the recipe's own proportion of roughly one egg to 7-8 fl oz milk.
- Pipe macaroniStraight hollow tubes rather than the modern elbow shape. Ziti or bucatini snapped into inch lengths is the closest match; elbows will work but hold less of the custard.
- The first boilA quarter of an hour in plain water is far longer than modern macaroni needs. With modern macaroni, boil 4-5 minutes only — it finishes cooking in the stock and again in the oven, and three stages of cooking will turn it to mush.
- Simmering in stock"By the side of the fire" means a gentle heat away from the direct fire: the barest simmer. The recipe says nothing about draining, but the macaroni should have taken up most of the pint before the custard goes over it. Use a well-flavoured chicken or veal stock; a weak or salty commercial broth leaves the dish flat or over-seasoned.
- The custardThree-quarters of a pint here is the imperial pint, so about 15 fl oz milk to two eggs. Beat the eggs into cold or barely warm milk, not hot, and season it — the stock does not carry enough salt through to the custard.
- Maitre d'hotel sauceThe term in this period covers both a maitre d'hotel butter (butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, pepper and salt) and a made sauce of the same flavourings; the recipe specifies sauce. Either way, that variant is a different and much quicker dish.
Macaroni was known in England well before the nineteenth century as an expensive import, and in the 1760s and 1770s a "macaroni" was also slang for a young man affecting Continental fashion; by the time Cassell's was compiled it had become an ordinary economical standby, cheap starch to be stretched with stock, milk and eggs. The recipe demonstrates two techniques at once: cooking pasta in flavoured liquid rather than plain water, and setting a savoury custard around it. The absence of cheese is worth noting — the cheese-sauced macaroni familiar today was only one treatment among many, and this entry binds the pasta with egg and milk or, in the variant, dresses it with a maitre d'hotel sauce.