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Macaroni with Cream Sauce
Blend one tablespoon of butter with one tablespoon of flour, and add one cup of milk. Cook until thick, and season with salt and pepper. Pour this over one-half package of Larkin Macaroni which has previously been cooked and drained. Serve with or without cheese
A plain white sauce poured over boiled macaroni — the whole thing hinges on cooking the roux long enough that the flour loses its raw taste. Two brief notes on quantities and one on the cheese, and it works as written.
- "One-half package"The package size is not stated in the recipe. If it was a one-pound package, half is about 8 oz dry, which yields roughly 4 cups cooked. That is generous for one cup of sauce; a scant 6 oz gives a better ratio if you want the pasta properly coated.
- The sauce is a small oneOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to one cup of milk is a thin white sauce by modern reckoning. For something that clings, use two tablespoons of each to the cup of milk.
- Cook the roux first"Blend" here means melt the butter and stir in the flour, then let it bubble a minute or two before the milk goes in. Skipping that step is the usual reason a flour sauce tastes pasty.
- Add the milk warm and off the heatTake the pan from the fire, whisk in the milk a little at a time, then return it and cook until it coats a spoon — three to five minutes at a bare simmer.
- Season past what seems rightSalt and pepper are the only flavourings, so the sauce needs more salt than you would expect; nutmeg appears in some period white sauces and is not out of place.
- The cheese"With or without cheese" means grated cheese stirred in at the end or scattered over the top. A firm aged cheddar or a dry grating cheese melts more smoothly into a flour sauce than a young, wet one.
- If you want it brownedThe recipe stops at the stove. Turned into a buttered dish, topped with crumbs and cheese, and baked in a moderate oven (about 375F) for 20 minutes, it moves towards a baked macaroni.
- YieldServes three to four as a side dish, two as a supper.
Recipes that name a brand in the ingredient list — "Larkin Macaroni" — mark this as promotional cookery, the kind of booklet issued by a manufacturer or, in the Larkin Company's case, given away as a premium with soap and grocery orders in the decades either side of 1900. The dish itself is the oldest trick in the Anglo-American pasta repertoire: boiled macaroni bound with a butter-and-flour white sauce, a formula that had hardened into a standard by the time Fannie Farmer was codifying "one tablespoon butter, one tablespoon flour, one cup milk" as the universal thin sauce. Cheese, notably, is optional here.