Home › Miscellaneous › Sablushed 1Sts
Sablushed 1Sts
Heat a pint of tomatoes, add a little onion, a bay-leaf, salt, pepper and a tablespoon of butter. Add the macaroni and serve with grated cheese.
A bare-bones tomato sauce for macaroni, written for a cook who already knows the pasta half. The original assumes you have boiled macaroni waiting, and gives no quantity for it.
- The missing ingredientMacaroni is called for but never measured. For a pint of tomatoes, figure 8 oz dry macaroni, boiled in well-salted water until just tender, which serves three or four.
- A pint of tomatoesTwo cups: roughly a 14.5 oz can with its juice, topped up, or about 1 lb of fresh tomatoes peeled and chopped. Canned tomatoes were widely available by 1911, though the recipe does not say which the cook should use.
- Reduce before combiningThe hinge of the dish: let the tomatoes simmer 15 to 20 minutes until thick enough to coat a spoon before the macaroni goes in. Added straight off the heat, a pint of canned tomatoes will leave you with soup.
- A little onionHalf a small onion, minced fine, and it wants to soften in the butter first rather than being dropped into the tomatoes raw. Move the butter to the start of the process and the sauce gains considerably.
- The bay-leafOne dried leaf, and fish it out before serving. Twenty minutes is plenty of contact time.
- Grated cheeseParmesan or a dry aged cheese grated fine; imported Parmesan or a sharp dry Cheddar would both have been available in 1911. Pass it at the table as written rather than stirring it in.
- SeasoningCanned tomatoes vary enormously in acidity. Taste at the end and correct with salt and, if it bites, a pinch of sugar.
This comes from Rufus Estes's Good Things to Eat (1911), one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American author. Estes was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1857 and spent years cooking in Pullman dining cars for railroad passengers before moving to the subsidiary kitchens of United States Steel in Chicago, and his book carries the marks of that professional life: terse instructions, no hand-holding, and a working cook's assumption that the reader knows the basics. Macaroni dressed with tomato and cheese was thoroughly domesticated in American cooking by 1911, and it turns up in nineteenth-century household manuals as a plain, economical supper dish. The garbled title on this page is an artifact of the scanning and transcription of the original text rather than anything Estes wrote.