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Saged Macaroni
1/2 cup macaroni 2 tablespoons nut butter 2 cups hot water 2 1/2 tablespoons flour 3/4 teaspoon salt 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons sage Cook the macaroni according to directions. Put the nut butter into a small saucepan, and with a batter whip stir a little of the hot water into it and stir till smooth. Continue stirring in water till all the water is used and the whole is perfectly smooth. Put it on the stove and heat to boiling, watching it carefully, because it is very likely to boil over as soon as it begins to boil. Stir the flour smooth with two tablespoons of cold water, and stir it into the sauce as soon as it begins to boil. Allow it to cook slowly for five minutes, add the salt and sage. When the macaroni is cooked and drained, stir it into the sauce, and heat all together.
A nut-butter white sauce standing in for a milk sauce, seasoned heavily with sage. The whole dish hinges on emulsifying the nut butter smoothly before any heat reaches it.
- Nut butterIn health-reform cookbooks of this period this means a plain ground nut paste with nothing added but sometimes salt: peanut, almond or cashew. Modern peanut butter with added sugar and hydrogenated oil will taste sweet and may separate; use a natural grind-only butter, stirred well.
- Add the water graduallyDo not dump the 2 cups in at once. Work in a tablespoon or two at a time and beat to a smooth paste each time, as with a mayonnaise; only then thin it out. Adding water too fast leaves permanent lumps of nut butter that no amount of cooking will disperse.
- Batter whipA wire whisk. A small balloon whisk or an immersion blender both work; the immersion blender makes the emulsion almost foolproof.
- Why it boils overThe recipe warns of this explicitly. The thickened nut emulsion seems to climb the pan very suddenly as it reaches the boil; use a roomy saucepan, at least twice the volume of the liquid, and stay with it.
- The flour2 1/2 tablespoons slaked in 2 tablespoons cold water gives a light pouring sauce. Five minutes of slow cooking is the minimum to lose the raw-flour taste; stir the bottom, as nut sauces scorch readily.
- SageAt 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons this is most likely dried sage rather than fresh, and probably the fluffy rubbed form. If you have ground sage, which is denser and more bitter, start at half that and taste. It goes in near the end, as directed.
- Macaroni1/2 cup dry elbow macaroni is about 2 ounces. Cook in well-salted water, drain but do not rinse, and combine while both are hot.
- YieldOne generous or two modest servings; two small sides at most. The proportions scale directly if you need more.
This comes out of the American vegetarian health-reform kitchen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where nut butters were promoted as a substitute for cream, butter and milk. Nut butter mills were a fixture of sanitarium kitchens and of the mail-order food companies that grew up around them, and cookbooks of the movement are full of nut-butter gravies, nut milks and nut roasts built on exactly this technique: emulsify the paste with water, thicken with flour, season. The sage is doing recognizable work here too. In flesh-free cooking of the period, sage was the shorthand flavor for poultry stuffing and for sausage, so a "saged" dish carried the savory associations of a meat dinner without the meat, much as the same books used celery salt and thyme. The result is closer to a sage gravy poured over pasta than to anything Italian, and it reflects a household in which macaroni was simply a starch to be sauced.