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Mushrooms and Macaroni
Boil a quarter of a pound of macaroni in a pint and a half of water, with a little pepper and salt, for twenty minutes, or till a piece of it can be crushed between the finger and thumb. Drain the macaroni, put it into a clean stewpan, pour a quarter of a pint of stock over it, with an ounce of grated cheese. Stir it over a gentle fire for five minutes; turn out on a hot dish. Have ready half a pound of mushrooms, put them on the macaroni, and serve. To prepare the mushrooms, wash and skin them, cut them into slices, and put them into a stewpan with an ounce of butter and a little pepper and salt. Toss them over the fire for ten minutes, take them up, and they are ready. Probable cost, 1s.
A simple savoury from the era when macaroni was cooked soft and cheese was a seasoning rather than a sauce. Two things need adjusting: the pasta timing and the mushroom preparation.
- Cut the boiling timeTwenty minutes will reduce most modern dried macaroni to paste. Today's extruded pasta needs 8-11 minutes; the recipe's own test - a piece that crushes between finger and thumb - is still the right one, so start checking at eight.
- MeasuresA quarter pound of macaroni is 4 oz (about 115 g), a pint and a half of water is 30 fl oz British measure (roughly 3 1/2 US cups), and a quarter pint of stock is 5 fl oz, a scant 2/3 US cup. An ounce of grated cheese is about 1/4 cup packed.
- More water than thisA pint and a half is a tight amount of water for four ounces of macaroni, and the pan will need watching for sticking. A large pan and plenty of salted water is easier; the stock added afterwards is what carries the seasoning.
- "Skin them"This assumes large open field or horse mushrooms, whose caps peel and whose gills are dark and dusty. Cultivated chestnut or button mushrooms need neither peeling nor washing - wipe them, trim the stem end, and slice.
- Ten minutes in butter is deliberateSliced mushrooms give up a great deal of water. The full ten minutes drives it off and concentrates the flavour, which matters here because the mushrooms sit on top rather than being folded through a sauce. Keep the heat brisk enough that they colour instead of stewing.
- The cheese'Grated cheese' in a Victorian dish of this kind was often Parmesan or a hard dry Cheddar. A soft young cheese will string rather than melt into the stock; use something aged and dry.
- YieldFour ounces of macaroni and half a pound of mushrooms serves two as a light supper, or four as a savoury course before or after the meat.
- Probable costOne shilling for the dish - a reminder that Cassell's costed its recipes for a household keeping accounts, not as a period curiosity.
Macaroni was known in Britain well before the Victorian period and was still a faintly genteel foreign item when Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s and 80s: it appears in these pages boiled soft, dressed with stock and grated cheese, and served as a savoury or a light entree rather than as a plate of pasta in the Italian sense. The instruction to skin the mushrooms suggests large field mushrooms with tough peelable cuticles rather than the cultivated white mushroom that came to dominate British greengrocers in the twentieth century. The costing at the end of the recipes was aimed at a household that needed to know before beginning what a dish would take out of the week's housekeeping money.