Home › The Principles of Cookery › Macaroni, with Chestnuts
Macaroni, with Chestnuts
Roast a dozen fine chestnuts in their shells, peel and pound them to a paste. Season with a small tea-spoonful of salt, and put them into a stewpan with eight ounces of macaroni, previously boiled and drained, according to the recipe given for boiling macaroni; add three ounces of butter and a large onion, uncut. Shake the whole well together, and stir round in the pan for ten or twelve minutes. If dry, pour in a table-spoonful of milk, and mix again until hot, when remove the onion, and dish the macaroni. Well cover it with equal quantities of grated Parmesan and fine bread-crumbs, and brown lightly in the oven, or before the fire. Butter should be run over the top.
A plain Victorian pasta dish that depends on two things: chestnuts pounded smooth enough to coat the macaroni, and a light hand with the browning. Neither is difficult, but both are easy to rush.
- ChestnutsA dozen "fine" chestnuts gives roughly 6-7 oz in the shell, or somewhere around 5 oz peeled. Score the flat side before roasting and peel while still hot, as both the shell and the inner skin cling once cool. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are a fair substitute; a food processor does in seconds what the mortar was for, though a little texture is no fault.
- The macaroniEight ounces dry, which serves three or four as a supper dish. Victorian macaroni was the long hollow kind and was boiled until quite soft, often twenty minutes or more. Cook to the package time instead, drain, and expect it to soften further during the ten or twelve minutes in the pan.
- The uncut onionThis is a flavouring device, not an ingredient. The whole peeled onion perfumes the butter and is lifted out before serving. Do not chop it, and do not skip it either, as it is the only aromatic in the dish.
- Butter and moistureThree ounces of butter to eight ounces of macaroni is generous by modern taste; two ounces makes a less oily dish. The tablespoon of milk is a minimum, and the chestnut paste drinks liquid greedily. Add milk a spoonful at a time until the mixture is creamy rather than pasty.
- Browning"Brown lightly in the oven" means a hot oven for about ten minutes, or a couple of minutes under a broiler with the dish close to the element; the original gives no temperature, so any figure is a modern guess. "Before the fire" was the older method, using a salamander or the open hearth; the broiler is its direct descendant. Watch it, as breadcrumb and Parmesan crusts go from gold to bitter quickly.
- The toppingEqual parts grated Parmesan and dry breadcrumbs, enough to cover well; the original gives no quantity. Butter run over the top, as the recipe directs, is what makes the crust crisp rather than dusty.
- SeasoningA small teaspoon of salt seasons the chestnuts alone; the pasta water and the Parmesan bring more. Taste before the topping goes on, and consider black pepper, which the original does not mention but the dish welcomes.
Cassell's places this among its macaroni dishes at a moment when Italian pasta had become thoroughly domesticated in British cooking but was still treated as a dish in its own right rather than a base for sauce. Macaroni came in long hollow lengths, was boiled soft, dressed with butter and Parmesan, and browned under a crust of cheese and crumbs -- a formula the book repeats with variations. Chestnuts belonged to the same autumn kitchen: cheap, filling, sold roasted in the street, and used in stuffings, purees and sweets across Europe. Combining them with macaroni is a frugal way to make a small quantity of pasta feed more people, and the trick of steeping a whole onion in the butter and then removing it recurs often enough in nineteenth-century cookery to look like a habit of the period, suggesting a preference for the flavour of alliums over their visible presence.