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Baked Macaroni
Put Macaroni with White Sauce in buttered baking dish, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown.
This is a two-line assembly note that assumes you have already made the book's Macaroni with White Sauce; the whole dish stands or falls on that sauce being loose enough to survive the oven. Everything below fills in what the original leaves to the cook's judgment.
- The hinge: keep the sauce thinBaked macaroni dries out as it heats, so the sauce should look slightly too runny going into the dish. A thin white sauce of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 2 cups milk per pound of cooked macaroni is about right.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 375F, uncovered, on the upper-middle rack. That browns crumbs in roughly 20 to 25 minutes while the interior comes up to a bubble.
- Buttered crumbsPeriod usage means dry bread crumbs tossed with melted butter, about 1 tablespoon butter to 1/2 cup crumbs, so each crumb is coated and toasts rather than scorches. Fresh soft crumbs will brown too fast and stay damp underneath.
- Undercook the macaroniIt absorbs sauce in the oven. Boil it two minutes short of tender, drain, and do not rinse if you want the sauce to cling.
- CheeseThis entry is deliberately plain, and books of this type often carried macaroni with cheese as a separate recipe. If you want macaroni and cheese, stir 1 1/2 to 2 cups grated sharp cheese into the hot sauce off the heat so it melts without breaking.
- Dish and yieldA pound of dry macaroni with enough sauce to coat it will roughly fill a 9x13 inch dish, serving about eight as a side or five or six as a supper dish; scale the sauce to the cooked weight, not the dry. Butter the dish generously; the sauce sticks hard once it catches.
- If made aheadAssembled cold from the refrigerator, it needs 40 to 45 minutes and the crumbs should go on for the last 20 so they do not burn while the center heats.
Macaroni reached American cookbooks first as a genteel Italian novelty and then, by the late nineteenth century, as an economy food filed under cereals or farinaceous dishes rather than under pasta, which is why it sits here beside rice and hominy. Domestic-science writers of the period made much of it as cheap starch that could be made nourishing with milk, butter and flour, the same white sauce that carried creamed vegetables, creamed fish and scalloped dishes elsewhere in the same books. The habit of writing a recipe as a single line that refers back to a base preparation is characteristic of the cooking-school tradition: pupils learned white sauce once, then learned the dishes built on it. Baked crumb-topped macaroni of this kind belongs to the same family as the American macaroni and cheese casserole, with the cheese here treated as an optional extra rather than the point of the dish.