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Tomatoes and Macaroni
Take half a pound of macaroni, wash it, and boil it till tender. Take six or more ripe tomatoes, cut off the stalks, squeeze out the pips, and place the fruit in a buttered tin in the oven. It is well to baste them once or twice with the butter and the juice that will come from them. Put the macaroni, when tender and well-drained, into a vegetable dish. Pour the butter and juice from the tin over the macaroni, add pepper and salt, and toss it lightly together. Place the whole tomatoes on the top of the macaroni, round the edge, at equal distances. Sprinkle a little chopped parsley on top, and serve.
A simple Victorian vegetable dish that works well provided the tomatoes are genuinely ripe and the macaroni is not overcooked. Two adjustments carry most of the weight: shorter pasta cooking and a hotter oven than the book implies.
- Skip the washingNineteenth-century macaroni came loose from the box or bin and was often dusty, so rinsing made sense. Boxed dried pasta today needs nothing but salted boiling water.
- "Till tender"Victorian instructions often meant twenty minutes or more, which gives soft, floppy macaroni. Modern dried elbows or short tubes need 8-10 minutes; drain while there is still a little bite, since the tomato butter will be tossed through afterwards.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Roast the tomatoes at about 375-400F for 20-30 minutes until they slump but still hold their shape; too low and they merely stew and collapse, too high and the skins burst before the flesh softens.
- Quantity of butterThe recipe says only to use a buttered tin, and gives no amount, yet expects enough butter in it to baste with and then to pour over the pasta. For half a pound of macaroni, 2 to 3 oz (4-6 tablespoons) is a workable modern allowance, or the finished dish will be dry.
- Squeezing out the pipsCut a small opening at the top, not the base, so the tomato keeps its round shape for the final arrangement. Note that the recipe wants the juice that runs in the tin: it is basted with and then poured over the macaroni, so only the seeds and their loose liquid are squeezed away.
- "Vegetable dish"A shallow serving dish, warmed. The tomatoes are set on the pasta at the last moment and the dish goes straight to the table, so nothing is baked together.
- YieldHalf a pound of macaroni with six tomatoes serves three or four as a side, two as a light main. Grated Parmesan is not in the original but is entirely in keeping with the period's macaroni cookery.
Macaroni had been familiar in British kitchens since the eighteenth century, usually boiled soft and baked with cheese and cream in the manner such books called macaroni au gratin. Tomatoes came later to the English table: still treated with some suspicion in the early nineteenth century, they were increasingly grown under glass and sold in markets by the 1880s and 1890s, which is roughly when recipes of this kind become common in the large household dictionaries. Its careful arrangement of whole tomatoes at equal distances around the rim is characteristic of late-Victorian service, where a plain dish was expected to be presented with some geometry. The instruction to save the butter and tomato juice from the roasting tin reflects the same period's assumption that flavour lives in what collects at the bottom of the pan.