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Macaroni with White Sauce
2 cups boiled macaroni 1½ cups White Sauce No. 1 Heat the macaroni in the white sauce; add more salt if needed.
Two lines of text that assume you already have a pot of white sauce standing by. The whole dish turns on the sauce, so that is where the attention belongs.
- White Sauce No. 1Books of this kind number their white sauces by thickness. A medium pouring sauce is usually about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then whisked with 1 cup milk and seasoned with salt; scaled up, roughly 3 tablespoons each to 1 1/2 cups milk. Check your copy of the book for its own No. 1 proportions and follow those, since some books reserve No. 1 for the thinnest version.
- Cook the roux before the milk goes inTwo minutes of bubbling the butter and flour together over low heat takes the raw taste out. It should foam and smell faintly nutty, not colour.
- Two cups boiled macaroniThat is the cooked volume, not the dry. Around 1 cup dry elbow macaroni, roughly 3 1/2 to 4 oz, will get you there. Drain it but do not rinse; the surface starch helps the sauce cling.
- Macaroni of the periodMacaroni was often sold as long straight tubes to be snapped into lengths before boiling, though short cut shapes were available too. Any short tubular shape stands in perfectly well.
- SaltThe instruction to add more salt if needed is doing real work. Sauce that tasted right in the pan will taste flat once it is diluted by a couple of cups of bland pasta, so season again at the end.
- Heating, not simmeringFold the macaroni through over low heat only until steaming. Held at a boil the sauce tightens and the pasta softens past the point of pleasure; if it thickens too far, loosen it with a splash of milk.
- YieldServes three or four as a side dish, or two as a plain supper.
- If you want it brownedThe recipe stops at the saucepan. To make the baked version, turn it into a buttered dish, scatter with buttered crumbs or grated cheese, and bake at 400F until the top colours.
Macaroni reached American cookbooks well before this one and was for a long time treated as a genteel, faintly Italian novelty; by the time the Gold Medal Flour Cook Book appeared it had settled into the domestic-science canon as a cheap, filling starch. The recipe's real subject is the white sauce, the milk-and-flour foundation that the cooking-school movement of the late nineteenth century drilled into students as the parent of dozens of other dishes. Books like this one, published by a flour miller, had an obvious interest in a sauce built on flour and in a repertoire of numbered, graduated versions the cook could reference by name rather than repeat in full. What survives on the page is the skeleton of the household mac and cheese, still without the cheese.