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Macaroni, with Cheese and Eggs
Half cook in boiling salted water twelve ounces of macaroni; drain, and replace in a pan with four ounces of grated cheese, four ounces of butter, and four well-whisked eggs. Mix well, and stir over a slow fire for eighteen or twenty minutes. Serve with grated cheese.
A stovetop macaroni cheese bound with egg rather than a white sauce. It stands or falls on heat control: the egg has to set into a custard around the pasta, not scramble into curds.
- The hinge: very low heatUse the lowest burner setting, a heavy pan, and constant stirring, or set the pan over barely simmering water. If the eggs meet direct heat above about 180F they will curdle and weep butter, and no amount of stirring brings them back.
- "Half cook" the macaroniBoil it for roughly half the time on the packet, about 4 minutes for dried elbows, so it is still firm at the centre. It finishes in the pan with the egg and cheese, absorbing moisture as it goes.
- The 18-20 minutesThat figure may reflect Victorian long-tube macaroni, generally thicker than modern elbows, and also allows time for the egg to set. With today's pasta the mixture will likely be thickened and the pasta tender before 20 minutes; work by texture, and pull the pan off as soon as the egg coats the macaroni like a loose custard.
- CheeseThe unspecified "grated cheese" would most likely have been Parmesan or a hard, dry English cheese. Parmesan or a well-aged Cheddar both work; young supermarket Cheddar releases more water and oil than an egg-bound sauce takes well.
- Quantities and richnessFour ounces of butter is a full US stick, 113g, against 12 oz (340g) of dry pasta. That is very rich by current taste; halving the butter changes nothing structurally, since the eggs do the binding.
- Pan liquidDrain the macaroni but leave it damp, or reserve a few tablespoons of the cooking water. A completely dry pan of pasta plus egg sets too stiff.
- YieldTwelve ounces of macaroni with this much butter, cheese and egg serves four generously as a main dish, or six as a side.
This belongs to an older English tradition of macaroni than the baked, breadcrumbed casserole most people now picture. Italian pasta reached British tables in quantity in the eighteenth century as an imported luxury, dry and sold in long tubes to be broken up, and by the 1880s it was cheap enough to appear in economical household cookery. Binding it with eggs, butter and grated hard cheese over gentle heat is often likened to the Neapolitan habit of finishing pasta with cheese and egg, and it produces a dish that is nearer a savoury custard than a sauce. The instruction to "serve with grated cheese" may reflect what is often said to have been a Victorian habit of sending grated cheese to table alongside macaroni.