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One Pourd
PRICE IS CENTS MACARONI au GRATIN Put a layer of cooked Larkin Macaroni in the bottom of a buttered quart pudding-dish, then a thin layer of ordinary creamery cheese, another layer of macaroni and so on until the dish is filled, scattering bits of butter among the layers, and adding a cup of milk, and bake. Be careful not to bake too long.
A bare-bones layered macaroni bake from a manufacturer's booklet, written for cooks who already knew what a gratin should look like. The stray line about price is a fragment of the surrounding advertisement, not part of the method.
- The hinge: do not overbakeThe closing line is the only real instruction. With no white sauce to protect it, the cheese will break and weep oil and the macaroni will dry to a crust if held too long. The recipe names no oven temperature; something around 375F for twenty-five to thirty minutes, until the top is browned and the milk is just bubbling at the edges, should be enough.
- "Ordinary creamery cheese"In American usage of the period this generally meant plain factory-made cheese rather than farmhouse or imported, in practice a mild unaged cheddar-type block. A young medium cheddar is the closest match; a sharp aged cheddar or an imported Gruyere will taste more assertive than the recipe intends and is likelier to separate.
- Quart pudding-dishA four-cup baking dish, roughly 7 by 5 inches or a small souffle dish. It yields two generous or three modest servings.
- Cook the macaroni shortBoil it a couple of minutes under the package time. It keeps absorbing the milk in the oven, and macaroni boiled fully soft first will end up mushy.
- Milk and butter quantitiesA cup of milk is about right for a quart dish; pour it over the assembled layers rather than into them so it settles through. Figure two to three tablespoons of butter scattered in total, plus what you use on the dish.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified. Season the layers as you build them or the dish will taste flat.
- No crumbsDespite the name, nothing is scattered on top. If you want the crisp lid a modern reader expects from a gratin, buttered breadcrumbs over the last layer of cheese belong to a different tradition of the same dish — the original relies on the exposed cheese browning.
"Larkin Macaroni" places this page in the world of the mail-order premium: the Larkin Company of Buffalo built an enormous business selling soap and then groceries direct to households, and its recipe booklets existed to show buyers what to do with the branded goods arriving in the box. That commercial frame explains the recipe's thinness \— no sauce, no crumbs, no seasoning, just layers and a splash of milk \— since the point was the product rather than the technique. Macaroni and cheese itself was long established in American cooking by then, generally traced through English and Italian precedents and given a famous early American outing in Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-Wife (1824), whose version is similarly plain: macaroni, cheese, butter, layered and baked. What the Larkin booklet may document is the moment dried macaroni stopped being a delicacy made or imported at some trouble and became a pantry staple mailed to the door in a paper package.