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Macaroni, with Anchovies and Butter
Fry with butter one small finely-chopped onion, a little parsley, and five or six anchovies prepared and cut up. Parboil twelve ounces of macaroni for seven or eight minutes, drain, and replace in the pan with the fried onion, etc.; add half a tumbler of white wine, half a pint of stock, and a pinch of white pepper; boil over a slow fire for twenty minutes, arrange in layers in a dish, and sprinkle thickly with grated cheese.
A one-pan pasta cooked risotto-fashion in wine and stock rather than drained and sauced. The timings assume the softer, coarser macaroni of the period, so they need adjusting.
- The hinge: don't parboil for the full timeThe pasta gets a further twenty minutes of simmering in liquid, so it should leave the first boil distinctly hard — three to four minutes in salted water with modern dried macaroni, not seven or eight. Otherwise it collapses into paste before the liquid has reduced.
- Half a tumbler of white wineA Victorian tumbler is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so half is about 1/2 cup (120 ml). Any dry white will do; the point is acidity against the butter and anchovy.
- Half a pint of stockAn Imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. Keep a little more warm alongside — 12 oz of macaroni may want it, and the dish should finish moist rather than dry.
- "Anchovies prepared"This means salt-packed anchovies, rinsed of their salt, boned and filleted. Tinned fillets in oil are already prepared; five or six of them, chopped, dissolve into the butter in a minute or two over gentle heat.
- SaltAnchovies and stock both carry salt, and grated cheese adds more. Salt the parboiling water normally but add none to the pan; taste before serving.
- "A slow fire"A bare simmer on the lowest useful burner setting, stirred often so the macaroni does not catch. Twenty minutes at a rolling boil will reduce the liquid long before the pasta is done.
- The cheeseMost likely Parmesan, though the recipe says only "grated cheese"; a dry aged pecorino also works. It is sprinkled over the layers off the heat — no baking is called for.
- YieldTwelve ounces of macaroni serves four as a main course, six as a first course. Serve at once — it stiffens as it cools.
Macaroni reached British cookery books long before tomato sauce did, and Cassell's treats it as a respectable staple rather than a novelty: the dictionary carries a run of macaroni entries dressed variously with butter, cheese, stock, gravy or, as here, anchovy. The anchovy is the older English note in the dish — salted anchovies were a standard larder item and a standard savoury seasoning in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century kitchens, used much as cooks now use fish sauce or Worcestershire, and anchovy-and-butter sauces long predate any Italian influence in the same books. Finishing the pasta in its liquid over a low fire so it absorbs the wine and stock, then layering it with grated cheese, is a method that survives in modern pasta cooking. The wine, the stock and the cheese together suggest a household with a stockpot going and an eye on Continental cooking.