Home › Cereals › Baked Macaroni with Cheese
Baked Macaroni with Cheese
Put a layer of boiled macaroni in buttered baking dish, sprinkle with grated cheese; repeat, pour over White Sauce, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century cookery books, where the white sauce and the boiled macaroni were assumed knowledge from earlier pages. The quantities are left entirely to the cook.
- ProportionsFor a 2-quart dish, figure 8 oz dry macaroni (about 4 cups cooked), 2 cups white sauce, and 6-8 oz grated cheese. Less sauce than that and the top layers bake dry.
- White SauceA serviceable sauce here is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk, seasoned with salt and a little pepper; by the usual period proportions this is on the thin side, which suits a dish that has to coat layers of macaroni. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Undercook the macaroniBoil it a couple of minutes short of tender. It keeps absorbing sauce in the oven, and fully cooked macaroni turns to paste.
- CheeseThe recipe says only "grated cheese" and leaves the choice open; a firm aged cheddar or a dry grating cheese such as Parmesan both work. Pre-shredded supermarket cheese carries anti-caking starch and melts less smoothly; grate your own.
- Buttered crumbsToss 1/2 cup dry breadcrumbs with 1-2 tablespoons melted butter until evenly coated. Unbuttered crumbs scorch in patches rather than browning.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no temperature; 375F for 25-30 minutes works, until the crumbs are brown and the sauce bubbles at the edge. If the top browns before the interior is hot, the oven may be too hot, the dish too near the top, or the dish may have gone in cold from the refrigerator.
- YieldServes four as a main dish, six as a side.
Macaroni baked with cheese and a flour-thickened sauce was long established in Anglo-American cooking by the time this book was written, and the layered method here, alternating pasta and cheese under a white sauce and crumb crust, is a familiar American treatment in household manuals of the period. Domestic-science writers favored such dishes because they were cheap, filling, and could be assembled from pantry staples. The terse style is characteristic: cookbooks of this school taught a handful of foundation preparations such as White Sauce and buttered crumbs early on, then wrote later recipes as brief assemblies referring back to them.