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Macaroni with Tomato Sauce
3/4 cup macaroni 2 qts. boiling water 1 tablespoon salt 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1½ cup tomato juice 1 slice onion 2 slices green pepper Cook the macaroni in the boiling salted water for twenty minutes, drain and blanch. Brown the butter, add the flour and seasoning. Cook the tomato juice with slice of onion and green pepper, strain into cooked butter and flour slowly. Cook until smooth and thick and pour over the macaroni.
A plain flour-thickened tomato sauce over boiled macaroni, from the era when pasta was treated as a vegetable side rather than a main course. Two instructions need translating and one timing needs shortening.
- "Blanch" here means rinseIn this period blanching drained pasta meant pouring cold water over it to wash off surface starch and stop the cooking. Do it in a colander, then drain well so the sauce is not watered down.
- Twenty minutes is too longNineteenth- and early twentieth-century macaroni was a coarser, thicker extrusion than today's and was expected to be soft throughout. Modern dried elbows need 8 to 10 minutes; check the box and taste.
- The hinge is the browned butterBrowning the butter before adding the flour is what gives this sauce its flavor, and it is easy to take too far. Cook it over medium heat until it smells nutty and turns light hazelnut, then add the flour and cook the roux a minute or two before any liquid goes in.
- Quantities3/4 cup dry macaroni is roughly 3 oz, and 1 1/2 cups tomato juice with 3 tablespoons flour gives a distinctly thick, gravy-like sauce. Thin it with a little of the pasta water if you want it looser.
- "Seasoning" is unspecifiedSalt and pepper are the likely intention. Season the roux lightly, then correct after the tomato goes in, since reduction concentrates the salt.
- Tomato juiceCanned tomato juice works, though juice from home-stewed tomatoes would fit the period equally well; passed canned whole tomatoes are closer to homemade and thicker. Since the onion and pepper are strained out, the aromatics only need to be bruised, not chopped fine.
- Add the liquid off the boilStraining hot tomato juice slowly into the hot roux while whisking prevents lumps. Then simmer gently until it coats a spoon; flour sauces need a few minutes of cooking to lose their raw taste.
- YieldTwo generous side servings, or a light supper for two with bread and grated cheese, which the recipe does not call for but which the dish takes well.
Gold Medal's cookbooks were promotional literature for Washburn Crosby's flour, and flour-thickened sauces recur throughout them. Treating macaroni as a starchy accompaniment rather than a course of its own was common in American home cooking of the period. Canned tomato juice was a comparatively new convenience product, and its use in place of stewed fresh tomatoes points to a recipe written for a stocked pantry shelf.