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Nouilles, with Parmesan, or Au Gratin
Make half a pound of flour into nouilles paste, as directed in preceding recipes. Cut it into strips, and boil these for ten minutes in three pints of water, slightly salted. Take them out, drain them, and put them into a stewpan, with a pint of milk or gravy, an ounce of butter, the eighth of a nutmeg, grated, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Simmer gently until all the liquid has been absorbed, then add another quarter of a pint of either cream or gravy, a quarter of a pound of grated Parmesan, and another ounce of butter; shake the pan over the fire until the cheese is melted. Pile the mixture high in a buttered dish, sprinkle over it one ounce of grated Parmesan, a table-spoonful of finely-grated bread-crumbs, and the yolk of a hard-boiled egg passed through a sieve and powdered. Place the dish in the oven for a few minutes, or hold a red-hot iron shovel over it until it is lightly coloured, and serve as hot as possible. Time, altogether, an hour and a quarter. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A Victorian baked pasta that predates the arrival of "macaroni cheese" as a fixed idea: the noodles are made from scratch, simmered in milk or gravy until dry, then enriched with Parmesan and glazed. The one thing to change is the boiling time.
- Boil the noodles far lessTen minutes will reduce fresh egg noodles to mush. Freshly cut nouilles need two to three minutes in salted water, and they should be firm, since they then absorb a pint of liquid over the heat. Dried tagliatelle or fettuccine is a fair substitute; cook it a couple of minutes short of the packet time.
- Nouilles pasteThe paste referred to in the "preceding recipes" is not reproduced here, but it would have been a stiff egg pasta dough: roughly half a pound (about 2 cups) of flour worked with egg yolks, a little water or milk and a pinch of salt, rested, rolled thin, floured, rolled up and shredded into narrow strips.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pints are imperial, 20 fl oz. The pint of milk or gravy is about 2 1/2 US cups, and the further quarter-pint of cream or gravy about 2/3 cup.
- "Gravy"Here it means clear meat stock or the strained juices from a roast, not thickened sauce. Use a good brown veal or beef stock if you want the savoury version; milk and cream give the version most cooks will expect.
- Quantity of ParmesanA quarter of a pound is about 1 1/4 cups grated, plus another ounce on top. That is generous but correct for the dish; use real Parmigiano-Reggiano or grana padano and grate it fine so it melts into the liquid rather than stringing.
- The glazeThe "red-hot iron shovel" is a salamander, held above the surface to colour it without cooking further. A broiler two or three inches from the element for two to three minutes does the same work; in an oven, 425F for five to eight minutes.
- The sieved yolkThe powdered hard-boiled yolk over the top is a garnish for colour and richness, common in period gratins. It is optional, but add it after the browning if you want it to stay yellow.
- Timing and yieldThe hour and a quarter includes making and resting the dough. Working time at the stove is about twenty minutes. Six to eight as a course in a long Victorian dinner; four as a modern main.
Nouilles is simply the French for noodles, and its appearance in an English dictionary of cookery reflects how thoroughly late-Victorian professional kitchens worked in French vocabulary even for dishes of German and Italian ancestry. Ribbon pasta made at home from egg dough was standard practice across central Europe long before commercial dried pasta was widely sold in Britain. The finish is pure nineteenth-century garde-manger: cheese, crumbs and sieved egg yolk browned under a salamander, the iron plate heated in the fire and held over a dish to colour its surface. The costing of 1s. 6d. is characteristic of the book, which gave prices so a household could judge a recipe against the week's budget.