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Boiled Macaroni
3/4 cup macaroni broken in pieces 2 qts. boiling water 1 tablespoon salt Cook the macaroni in water that is boiling hard to prevent the pieces from sticking together. Cook for twenty-five minutes. Drain in strainer and pour over cold water.
Baked Macaroni, with Cheese 3/4 cup macaroni, broken in pieces 2 qts. boiling water 1 tablespoon salt 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 cup grated cheese 1½ cup scalded milk 1/4 cup buttered bread crumbs Cook the macaroni in the boiling water for twenty minutes; drain and blanch with cold water. Make a white sauce of the butter, flour and milk. Add seasoning to the sauce. Arrange a layer of cooked macaroni in the bottom of a buttered baking dish; sprinkle with the grated cheese, repeat until all the macaroni and cheese are used; pour over the white sauce, cover the top with buttered crumbs and bake for twenty minutes in a hot oven, or long enough to give the top a nice brown.
Two recipes in one entry: plain boiled macaroni and the baked cheese version built on it. Both were written for the coarse, thick-walled macaroni sold loose from a barrel, which is the source of the only real problem here.
- The cooking time is the hingeTwenty to twenty-five minutes will reduce modern extruded dried macaroni to paste. Today's elbows need 7-9 minutes for the plain dish, and 5-6 minutes — well short of tender — for the baked version, since they keep cooking in the sauce.
- "Blanch with cold water"Rinsing under cold water stops the cooking and strips surface starch so the pieces do not clump. Worth doing when the macaroni will be layered and baked; skip it if you are saucing the plain boiled macaroni immediately, since the starch helps the sauce cling.
- A hot ovenRead this as roughly 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat is enough to brown the crumbs and heat the dish through, given that everything going in is already hot.
- White sauce proportionsTwo tablespoons each of flour and butter to 1 1/2 cups milk gives a thin-to-medium sauce, which is correct — it thickens further as the macaroni absorbs it. Cook the roux a minute before adding the milk to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Scalded milkHeating milk to just below a simmer was in part a way of keeping unpasteurized milk sound, and it also helps the sauce come together without lumps. With pasteurized milk it is optional; warm milk simply blends into the roux more easily than cold.
- Seasoning"Add seasoning" means at least salt and pepper; nutmeg or a pinch of mustard powder turns up in some period versions. Season the sauce assertively; the pasta and crumbs dilute it.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in an American cookbook of this period generally means firm store cheese, close to what we would call Cheddar. Half a cup grated is about 2 ounces, a restrained amount by modern standards.
- Buttered crumbsToss fresh soft breadcrumbs with about a tablespoon of melted butter until evenly coated. Dry commercial crumbs will brown before they take up the butter and taste dusty.
- YieldThree-quarters of a cup of dry macaroni is roughly 3 ounces. Both recipes serve two as a side dish; double everything for a family-sized casserole, in a dish of at least a quart and a half.
Macaroni reached American tables well before it reached American factories — it was an imported luxury in the early nineteenth century, associated with Thomas Jefferson, who owned a pasta-extruding device and served macaroni with cheese at the President's House. By the time this book appeared, domestic production had made macaroni cheap and it had become an economical stretcher in household cooking. The pairing with a butter-flour-milk sauce is the American refinement: rather than dressing the pasta with cheese and its own cooking water, as in Italian practice, the dish is folded into the French white sauce that anchored so much turn-of-the-century home cooking. That the flour is specified as Gold Medal is a reminder of what this book was for — Washburn-Crosby (later General Mills) published it to put its own brand into the middle of every recipe, including a sauce where any flour would do.