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Macaroni with Cheese Sauce
Make the cream sauce, adding to it a half-cup of cheese cut into small pieces and stir until cheese is dissolved. Pour over the cooked macaroni, and brown.
Barely three lines, and it assumes you have already read the cream sauce recipe elsewhere in the book. Here is what the shorthand stands for.
- The cream sauceThe book assumes you have its own cream sauce recipe to hand. A typical white sauce of the period runs about 2 tablespoons butter melted with 2 tablespoons flour, cooked a minute without colouring, then 1 cup of milk or thin cream whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and a little white pepper before the cheese goes in.
- Melt the cheese off the heatMelt the cheese gently -- The recipe says only to stir until the cheese is dissolved. It helps to pull the pan off the burner once the sauce is thickened before stirring the cheese in; held over direct heat the proteins tighten and the fat can separate, leaving a grainy sauce that is hard to bring back.
- Half a cup of cheeseCut small, that is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 ounces — a modest amount by current expectations. A firm domestic Cheddar of the sort sold as 'American cheese' in 1911 is the likeliest intention; if you want the sauce more assertive, double it and thin with a splash more milk.
- The macaroniElbow or short cut tube macaroni, boiled in well-salted water and drained. Stop it a minute short of tender, since it goes on cooking under the sauce in the oven.
- "And brown"No temperature or time is given; ovens of the period were judged by feel. In a modern kitchen this means turning the sauced macaroni into a buttered dish and browning it in a hot oven, or under the broiler, until the top colours. Buttered crumbs or grated cheese over the top will give a better crust than the sauce alone, though the recipe does not call for them.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. As a rough estimate, a sauce built on one cup of milk will lightly dress somewhere around half a pound of dry macaroni, enough for a side dish for three or four.
Macaroni baked under a cheese-thickened white sauce was already old and thoroughly domesticated in American cookery by 1911 — the béchamel-and-cheese approach travelled from French professional kitchens into English and American household books through the nineteenth century, and boxed dry macaroni was cheap and widely sold well before the First World War. The extreme brevity here says something about the book and its author: Rufus Estes cooked for the Pullman Company and for the executives of a Chicago steel firm, and he wrote for readers he assumed could already make a cream sauce, cross-referencing it rather than repeating it.