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Macaroni with Tomato Sauce
Make a tomato sauce by blending one tablespoon of butter and one of flour, and adding one cup of strained tomato, heated. Cook until thoroughly done, and pour over a half-package of Larkin Macaroni.
A plain white-roux tomato sauce of the kind that filled American cookbooks around 1900. The recipe assumes you already know how to boil the macaroni, and it never mentions salt.
- Half a packageThe package size is not recoverable from the text, and Larkin's macaroni packaging is not documented here. Treat a half-package as about 8 oz dry, feeding four, as a working figure only.
- Cook the macaroni separatelyThe instruction to "pour over" the macaroni presumes it has already been boiled and drained, though the recipe says nothing about salting the water. Modern dry macaroni needs 7-9 minutes; period recipes not infrequently called for 20 minutes or more, which would collapse today's product.
- Strained tomatoThis means cooked tomato pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed -- what is now sold as tomato purée or passata. One cup of canned tomato purée is a direct substitute; whole canned tomatoes blended and sieved also work.
- Heat the tomato before addingThe recipe specifies heated tomato, which speeds the thickening; whatever the reason, add it gradually and whisk to keep the sauce smooth.
- "Cook until thoroughly done"Roux-thickened tomato sauce needs about 8-10 minutes at a bare simmer to lose the raw taste of the flour. Below that it tastes pasty.
- Season itNo salt or pepper is listed, which was common shorthand in period books. Salt to taste, and a pinch of sugar is useful if the tomato is sharp.
- ProportionsOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to one cup of liquid gives a thin pouring sauce. Double both fats and flour if you want something that clings to the macaroni.
This comes from a cookbook issued by the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, a soap manufacturer that expanded into a vast mail-order business in household goods and groceries, distributing them through club orders and a premium system. Recipe booklets like this one served the catalogue, and the page names "Larkin Macaroni" directly. By 1900 macaroni was widely available in America as a cheap, shelf-stable packaged good, which made it well suited to this sort of promotional cookery. The butter-and-flour sauce with sieved tomato is an economical treatment of the era, a white sauce with tomato standing in for the milk.