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Baked Macaroni
Boil macaroni as for the Italian method; drain; add 1 pint of hot milk, 1 tablespoonful of butter, and stir together, adding a little grated Parmesan. Turn this mixture into a buttered round agate baking-dish. Put little pieces of butter on top, and sprinkle over it Parmesan or other grated cheese. Bake thirty minutes and serve in dish in which it is baked, by placing it in a baking-dish form.
A plain baked macaroni from the era just before the dish became inseparable from a flour-thickened cheese sauce. There is no roux here: the binding comes from starchy pasta, hot milk, butter and cheese, so the pasta itself does the thickening.
- Quantity of macaroniThe recipe leans on an earlier entry for the boiling and never states an amount. One pint of milk with a tablespoon of butter will coat roughly 8 oz of dry macaroni; more than that and the dish bakes dry.
- "The Italian method"In books of this period the phrase generally points to boiling in well-salted water only until tender, rather than the much longer boiling common in English cookery. Cook it slightly firm, since it will take on milk in the oven.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Thirty minutes at 350F suits it; the aim is to set the milk and brown the top, not to boil the dish.
- Agate baking-dishAgate ware was speckled enamel over iron or steel, common in kitchens of the period. Any shallow round dish will serve.
- Hot milk, off the heatHot milk -- add the milk hot and stir it into the drained macaroni; milk held over direct heat once cheese is in it can curdle.
- ParmesanUse a genuine hard grating cheese, grated fine. The recipe's "other grated cheese" allows something like Cheddar or Gruyere on top, which will melt more readily.
- Serving "in a baking-dish form"This appears to refer to a holder or frame in which the hot dish was carried to the table. A trivet or folded napkin under the dish does the same job.
- YieldWith 8 oz of dry macaroni, four modest servings as a vegetable course, or two as a main dish.
Macaroni reached American tables as an imported luxury and stayed faintly Italian in name long after it had been domesticated: a number of cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s distinguish "the Italian method" of boiling pasta briefly in salted water from the softer, longer-boiled English treatment, and this recipe assumes the reader knows the difference. Notable here is the absence of a white sauce: the binding is left to the pasta, hot milk, butter and Parmesan, browned in the oven.