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Cereals and Flour Paste: Break
Break half a pound of macaroni into inch lengths and boil in salted water until tender. Drain, and put a layer of the macaroni in the bottom of a greased pudding dish, sprinkle with pepper, salt, onion juice, and grated cheese. Cover all with a layer of stewed and strained tomatoes that have been previously seasoned to taste. On these goes another layer of macaroni, and so on till the dish is full. The topmost layer must be of tomatoes sprinkled with crumbs and good-sized bits of butter. Set in hot oven, covered, for twenty minutes, then bake, uncovered, until the crumbs are brown. MARION HARLAND.
Spaghetti with Cheese. pound spaghetti, cupful Swiss cheese, 3 tablespoonfuls melted butter, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce. a Break the spaghetti into bits and boil in salted water. Grate the cheese and turn into a saucepan with the butter. Stir well, add the hot spaghetti; just long enough to melt the cheese; add tabasco, and serve very hot.
Spaghetti with Chicken. package spaghetti, 2 cupfuls chicken stock, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 cupful cold chicken, 1 egg.
Boil the spaghetti until tender; drain, drop in cold water, and drain again. Cut into half-inch pieces.
CEREALS AND FLOUR PASTE Thicken the stock with flour and butter. Stir in the chicken chopped fine and macaroni. Beat in the egg, whipped, remove from the fire, season to taste, turn into a buttered dish, sprinkle crumbs over the top, and bake half an hour.
Spaghetti Piquante. pound spaghetti, 1 teaspoonful butter, 1 teaspoonful flour, 2 cupfuls beef stock, \ 4 tablespoonfuls tomato catsup, 6 drops Sauce, McIlhenny's Tabasco 1 teaspoonful kitchen bouquet, Pinch salt, Dash paprika.
Break spaghetti into small bits.
Boil until tender, in salted water.
Drain and keep hot while you make the following sauce: Cook together the butter and flour; when blended pour the stock and stir until smooth, then add the catsup, tabasco, kitchen bouquet, salt, and paprika. Turn the spaghetti into this sauce, stir and pour the mixture into a dish.
Sprinkle buttered crumbs and grated cheese over the top, and bake till brown.
Entrades (Mexican recipe). 1 cupful olive oil, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 green onions, 1 spray parsley, 1 stalk celery, 1 leek, + garlic, 1 green pepper, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 tablespoonful Spanish sausage, cupful stock, package macaroni, Edam cheese.
Make a sauce of olive oil and butter heated together; in this fry the onion, parsley, celery, leek, garlic, pepper, all chopped fine. Season with salt and the sausage. After it is well cooked down, add the stock. Boil the macaroni until tender, then plunge in cold water to blanch.
Place on a large platter, strain the hot sauce over it, and cover the top with grated cheese.-MAY E. SOUTH- WORTH.
Baked Macaroni. pound macaroni, 1 quart stock, 1 tablespoonful butter.
Break the macaroni into inch lengths. Boil till tender in stock.
Drain, put the macaroni in a dish; pour over it½ cupful stock in which it was cooked, add the butter, in small pieces, here and there through it. Sift over it fine bread crumbs and grated cheese. Dot with bits of butter and brown.
Oatmeal. teaspoonful salt, 1 cupful oatmeal, 4 cupfuls water.
Put the boiling water in a granite pan, salt it, then scatter in the oatmeal. Allow it to cook six minutes, stirring steadily. Into the fireless cooker saucepan set the oatmeal dish, cover with a plate, and pour in boiling water to surround it till it almost reaches the top of dish. Cover, set on the stove and let the water boil five minutes, then place in the fireless cooker and leave there for five hours, or if required for breakfast, till morning. If it is not quite hot enough, set the cooker saucepan on the stove and let the water in the other vessel boil for a few minutes; then serve.
Quaker Oats. 2½ cupfuls boiling water, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 cupful Quaker oats.
Cook in exactly the same way as oatmeal.
Cream of Wheat.
MRS, CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 21 cupfuls water, ½ teaspoonful salt, cupful cream of wheat.
Prepare after the same fashion as oatmeal, and give four hours in the fireless cooker.
Cracked Wheat. 4 cupfuls cold water, 1 cupful cracked wheat, 1 teaspoonful salt.
Pour the cold water over the wheat and let it stand six hours. Put it in a granite pan as used for oatmeal and set it on an asbestos mat over the fire, allowing it to cook and swell for two hours, stirring occasionally. Cover closely, set into the fireless-cooker saucepan, pour boiling water around it, let it boil up, then put into the cooker and allow it to stand over night.
Indian Meal. 3½ cupfuls water, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 cupful cornmeal.
Bring the water to a boil, stir the meal slowly into it, being careful that it does not lump. Boil half an hour, stirring frequently, set into the saucepan of cooker with water around it and leave it over night.
Fine Hominy. 4 cupfuls water, 1 cupful hominy, 1 teaspoonful salt.
Treat this cereal in the same fashion as others, leaving in the cooker over night.
A run of pasta bakes followed by a set of breakfast cereals, all written for a kitchen with a coal range and a fireless cooker. The pasta dishes need almost no adjustment; the cereals need translating out of a vessel nobody owns.
- The fireless cookerA fireless cooker was an insulated box: food was brought to a boil, then sealed in to finish on retained heat over five hours or overnight. A heavy lidded pot in a 200F oven, a slow cooker on low, or a wide-mouth vacuum flask all do the same job. The inner dish standing in boiling water is a water bath, which keeps the grain from scorching.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities have lost their fractions in this printing — the spaghetti and macaroni weights, the Swiss cheese, the cream of wheat and its water. For the baked pastas, half a pound of dry pasta to a quart of stock or two cupfuls of sauce is the working ratio. Cream of wheat is roughly one part cereal to four or five parts water.
- Oven heatA "hot oven" of this period is usually reckoned at about 400-450F. Twenty minutes covered then uncovered until the crumbs brown is about right; at that heat the top should colour in another ten to fifteen minutes.
- Indian mealCornmeal, as the recipe itself glosses it. Period meal was coarser and stone-ground; modern fine degerminated cornmeal thickens faster and will need less than the full half-hour of stirring before it goes into the cooker.
- Oatmeal versus Quaker oatsThe distinction the book is drawing is between steel-cut or coarse-ground oatmeal and the rolled flakes Quaker had made a household name. Rolled oats do not want five hours of anything — fifteen minutes on the stove is enough. Reserve the overnight treatment for steel-cut.
- Granite pan and asbestos matGranite ware is speckled enamel over steel; any heavy enamelled or stainless pan serves. The asbestos mat was a heat diffuser — use a flame tamer or the lowest burner setting.
- Kitchen bouquet and catsupKitchen Bouquet is a caramel-and-vegetable browning sauce, still sold and still doing the same job of colouring a pale flour sauce. Many catsups of the period were thinner and sharper than modern ketchup, though commercial brands varied a good deal; cut the four tablespoonfuls back or add a splash of vinegar if the sauce reads sweet.
- The egg in the chicken spaghettiThe recipe reads 'Beat in the egg, whipped, remove from the fire'; better to reverse that and beat the whipped egg in off the heat, or it will scramble in the hot stock. No oven heat is given, but a moderate oven for the half-hour will set it into a light custard binding rather than a sauce.
- Blanching in cold waterTwo of these recipes drop cooked pasta into cold water. That stops the cooking and rinses off surface starch, which suits the Mexican dish where a hot sauce is strained over at the last moment. Skip it for anything that goes back into the oven — you want the starch there.
- YieldEach pasta dish, at half a pound of dry pasta, serves four as a main course or six as a side. The cereals give four breakfast portions each.
Marion Harland, whose baked macaroni opens this run, was the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune, one of the most widely read American domestic writers of the late nineteenth century; May E. Southworth, credited with the Mexican dish, compiled several California cookbooks in the same period. The page catches macaroni and spaghetti as ordinary American food -- served baked with cheese and crumbs in the gratin manner, boiled well past al dente, and cut into inch lengths. The named-brand ingredients are worth noting: McIlhenny's Tabasco, Quaker oats and Cream of Wheat all appear as though they were generic pantry staples, which is roughly what national advertising had made of them by the early 1900s. The cereal recipes belong to the brief vogue for the fireless cooker, an insulated box promoted as a fuel-saving substitute for tending a stove all morning, and they show its chief use: putting the porridge in at bedtime and finding it hot at breakfast.