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To Cook Larkin Macaroni
ARKIN Macaroni must be cooked in rapidly twenty minutes. Keep the water boiling vigorously. When finished pour into colander and pour cold water over it, to thoroughly separate the pieces from each other. To use, re-heat.
A brand instruction sheet rather than a dish, but it is still a method, and one worth reading against current practice. The line reads as though a word or two dropped out in typesetting: cook it in rapidly boiling water.
- Twenty minutes is far too longTwenty minutes is far too long by modern standards -- the period expectation was that macaroni be soft through. Modern dried elbow macaroni is done in 8 to 11 minutes; check the box and start tasting two minutes early.
- Salt the waterThe original says nothing about it. Use about 1 tablespoon of salt per 4 quarts of water; pasta seasoned after the fact tastes noticeably different.
- Water volume"Boiling vigorously" only works with room to move. Four quarts to a pound keeps the pot back at the boil quickly and stops the pieces from cementing together.
- The cold rinse is for holding, not for servingRinsing strips the surface starch that helps sauce cling, so skip it if the macaroni goes straight into a sauce. Follow it only when you are doing exactly what the recipe assumes: cooking ahead, separating the pieces, and reheating later.
- How to reheatDrop the rinsed macaroni into boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds, or warm it directly in hot sauce. Reheating in the oven without moisture dries it out.
- YieldOne pound of dry macaroni gives roughly 8 cups cooked, enough for four main-course servings or six to eight as a side or a baked dish base.
The Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, built an enormous mail-order business in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beginning in soap and expanding into groceries, coffee, spices and household goods sold direct to customers with premiums attached. Instructions like this one circulated with the product and were folded into household compilations, which may be why a cookbook page carries a brand name where you would expect only "macaroni." The twenty-minute cooking time is a fair record of American taste at the time: macaroni was treated as a starch to be boiled thoroughly soft, and the firm-to-the-tooth standard now taken for granted is often said to have spread in the United States only later, though the timing is uncertain. The cold-water rinse belongs to the same world, in which a cook parboiled in the morning what would be assembled at dinner.