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Macaroni with Nut Tomato Gravy
1/2 cup macaroni 1/4 cup strained tomato 1 3/4 cups water 2 tablespoons nut butter 2 tablespoons flour 3/4 teaspoon salt Put the nut butter in a saucepan, and with a batter whip stir the water into it, adding the water a little at a time and stirring it smooth as the water is added. Then stir in the strained tomato, and heat to boiling. Stir the flour smooth with two tablespoons cold water and stir it into the boiling sauce. Simmer five minutes. Add the salt. Stir the cooked and drained macaroni into the sauce, and reheat.
A plain flour-thickened nut gravy from the vegetarian health-reform kitchen, built on the same principle as a modern roux-free pan sauce. The recipe assumes you already know to boil and drain the macaroni; only the sauce is spelled out.
- Nut butterIn books of this school "nut butter" means a plain ground nut paste with nothing added — usually peanut or almond, sometimes a blend. Use an unsweetened, unsalted natural nut butter; commercial brands with added sugar, salt and stabilisers will make the gravy cloying and may separate less smoothly.
- Add the water graduallyThis is the hinge. Nut butter behaves like an emulsion: dumping all 1 3/4 cups of water in at once leaves oily specks floating on grey liquid. Work in a few tablespoons at a time until you have a smooth cream, then thin it out.
- Strained tomatoA quarter cup of thin tomato purée — cooked tomato pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed. Passata is the closest current product. Canned tomato paste is far more concentrated; if that is what you have, use about a tablespoon and make up the rest with water.
- Batter whipA wire whisk. Any balloon or sauce whisk does the job; a fork works for this quantity.
- The macaroni1/2 cup dry macaroni is roughly 2 oz, giving about a cup cooked. Boil it in salted water to the package time, drain, and hold it while you build the sauce — the recipe's order assumes the pasta is ready and waiting.
- Flour slurry and the five minutesThe recipe gives no reason for the simmer, but raw flour stirred into hot liquid tastes pasty and a few minutes at a bare simmer helps cook that out. Stir as it goes, as nut solids can scorch on the bottom of a thin pan.
- Salt last3/4 teaspoon is generous for this volume if your nut butter is already salted. Add it at the end, as directed, and taste.
- YieldTwo small servings, or one main dish. It is a soft, mild, deliberately bland preparation; a scrape of nutmeg or a little onion cooked in the sauce is not authentic but does it no harm.
Good Food and How to Prepare It belongs to the American health-reform cookery tradition that grew up around the sanitarium kitchens of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where meat, and often spice and stimulant with it, was set aside in favour of grains, nuts and vegetables. Nut butters were central to that project: ground nut pastes and "nut creams" were promoted as a wholesome substitute for meat, cream and butter all at once, and recipes of this period use them the way a French kitchen uses stock and dairy — as the body of a sauce. The result here is a gravy that reads oddly to modern eyes only because it does the work of a béchamel without milk, thickened with flour and tinted with a little tomato.