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Guava with Macaroni
a For this use only the very tart fruit. Peel and put pulp through sieve. In one pint of pulp rub smooth teaspoon of flour with a teaspoon of butter, and salt and pepper to taste. (A little lemon juice will be necessary with the milder varieties.) Bring this to scalding point in double-boiler. Have ready plain boiled macaroni cut in inch lengths; drain and add the prepared guava. Place in baking-dish, sprinkle breadcrumbs and bits of butter on top, and bake in quick oven fifteen or twenty minutes.
A savoury guava gratin, closer to a tomato-and-macaroni bake than to any dessert. The whole thing turns on the fruit being sharp enough to behave like a vegetable.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400–450F. Fifteen to twenty minutes at that heat is only long enough to brown the crumbs and set the top; the macaroni and the pulp are already cooked and hot when they go in.
- Choosing the fruitThe instruction to use "only the very tart fruit" is the hinge. Ripe, perfumed dessert guavas will make the dish taste like a mistake. Use fruit that is firm and barely blushing, and add the little lemon juice the recipe allows for if all you can get is sweet pink guava.
- Getting the pulpGuava is full of hard stone cells and seeds that no amount of cooking softens. Peel, quarter, and press through a sieve or a food mill with a fine plate — a blender will pulverise the seeds into grit rather than removing them. Expect roughly 1.5–2 lb of whole fruit to yield a pint of sieved pulp.
- The thickeningA teaspoon each of flour and butter to a pint of pulp is a very light bind, meant only to stop the fruit weeping in the dish. Rub them to a paste and whisk it into the cold pulp before heating, or you will get lumps.
- Scalding pointAbout 180F — steaming, with the surface just trembling, not boiling. The double boiler is there because guava pulp is thick and scorches readily over direct heat.
- MacaroniPeriod macaroni came in long tubes, hence "cut in inch lengths." Modern elbow or ziti needs no cutting. Boil it a minute short of the package time, since it finishes in the oven. About 8 oz dry pairs well with a pint of pulp.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, and no quantity of macaroni; on a pint of pulp it would feed about four as a side dish, or two or three as a supper in its own right. A shallow dish gives more of the crumb crust, which is the best part.
Guava reached the cookbooks of the English-speaking world mainly as a sweet — guava jelly and guava cheese were staples of Caribbean and Floridian kitchens and travelled well in tins, and it was probably in that form that most northern readers first met the fruit. What makes this entry unusual is that it treats guava as a savoury vegetable, standing in almost exactly where stewed tomato would stand in the era's ubiquitous baked macaroni. That substitution says a good deal about how single-fruit cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seem to have been assembled: an author would, so the pattern generally suggests, take one ingredient and work it methodically through every course of the meal, soup to sweet, to demonstrate its range. The result is often a dish that nobody in the fruit's home cuisine would recognise, but the logic here is sound — a tart green guava has the acidity and the pectin-rich body to do a tomato's job under a crumb crust.