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Pate of Macaroni
Put into a saucepan six ounces of the best macaroni, broken into convenient pieces, with a moderate-sized onion and three pints of boiling water, seasoned with half a salt-spoonful of salt and half a salt-spoonful of pepper, and let them simmer gently for twenty minutes; drain the macaroni well, put it back into the saucepan, with half a pint of broth, and let it simmer again until tender but unbroken and the onion is absorbed. Place a layer of the macaroni at the bottom of a deep pie-dish, sprinkle over it a dessert-spoonful of grated Parmesan, and put little pieces of butter here and there upon it; cover it with beef steak which has been seasoned rather highly, stewed until tender in good brown gravy, and then cut into small thin pieces. A pound of beef steak will be sufficient for this quantity of macaroni. If preferred, fricasseed chicken, minced veal, sweetbread cut into dice, or mushrooms, may be substituted for the beef, but they must all be stewed in rich gravy before they are put with the macaroni. Fill up the dish with alternate layers of macaroni and meat, and let the uppermost layer be composed of the former; sprinkle an ounce of Parmesan over the top, and pour over it half an ounce of clarified butter, then put the dish into a Dutch oven, before a clear fire, or into the oven, and when the cheese is dissolved the pate is ready for serving. Time to bake, five or six minutes. Probable cost, 2s., if made with steak. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A layered macaroni and meat pie that assumes both components are fully cooked before assembly — the oven stage only melts the cheese. Everything hinges on not overcooking the pasta, which is where a modern box of macaroni will betray you.
- Cook the macaroni far lessNineteenth-century macaroni was a thick, hard-dried tube that could take twenty minutes and then more time in broth. Modern dried elbow or short-cut macaroni needs about half its package time in the salted water — around 4 minutes — then two or three minutes in the broth to finish and take on flavour. The instruction "tender but unbroken" is the target, not the clock.
- Salt-spoonful and dessert-spoonfulA salt-spoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning here is about an eighth of a teaspoon each of salt and pepper for three pints of water — very light, because the broth and Parmesan carry the salt. A dessert-spoon is about two teaspoons.
- The onionA whole peeled onion simmered with the pasta is there to perfume it, and "the onion is absorbed" means it has collapsed into the broth. Fish out any surviving lumps before layering, or the texture goes wrong.
- "Half a pint of broth"Imperial half-pint, so 10 fl oz or a generous cup. Use a well-flavoured beef or chicken stock; the macaroni should drink most of it.
- The beefA pound of steak, seasoned highly and stewed until tender in brown gravy, then sliced thin — this is a braise, not a grilled steak, and it wants an hour or more of its own before the pie is assembled. Chuck or skirt suits it better than anything quick-cooking. The alternatives listed all follow the same rule: cooked and sauced first.
- Dutch oven and oven heatThe "Dutch oven" here is a reflector shield set before an open fire, not a lidded casserole. The recipe gives no temperature, only "the oven"; in a modern kitchen a hot oven for the five or six minutes given, or the dish slid under the broiler until the cheese melts and colours, does the same job.
- Clarified butterHalf an ounce is about a tablespoon. Clarified butter was the usual choice for pouring over a dish like this; whole butter's milk solids can brown under direct heat.
- YieldFour or five as written, in a deep pie-dish. The "probable cost, 2s." is a period price.
This belongs to the family of macaroni dishes often said to have entered British cookery from Italy, and later to the Victorian appetite for continental dishes reworked for the family table. The word pâté here seems to carry its older, broader sense of a filled pie or moulded dish rather than a smooth forcemeat, and the construction — alternating layers of pasta and sauced meat under a cheese crust — anticipates the baked pasta dishes that became familiar in English-speaking kitchens much later. Parmesan was among the more reliably available Italian ingredients in Victorian Britain, keeping and travelling well, which may be why it appears in these books far more often than any fresh Italian cheese. The list of substitutions is also telling: fricasseed chicken, minced veal, diced sweetbread and mushrooms are all things a Victorian cook might plausibly have had left over from an earlier meal.