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Cheese and Macaroni
4 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 1 slice onion ozs.) grated cheese ¼ lb. macaroni 1 gill (¼ pint) stock 1 gill (¼ pint) milk I bay leaf 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter 1 tablespoonful flour Salt and pepper to taste A few bread crumbs Break up the macaroni into short pieces, put it into a saucepan of boiling salted water, add one teaspoonful of butter, and boil quickly for half an hour. Put the stock, bay leaf, onion, and milk into a saucepan and bring to boiling point. Blend the butter and flour together in a saucepan over the fire; add the stock strained; stir till it boils, put in the macaroni and the grated cheese; mix well and season with the salt and pepper.
Butter a gratin dish, sprinkle it over with bread crumbs and grated cheese, pour in the mixture, sprinkle over with some more bread crumbs and grated cheese, put a few pieces of butter here and there on the top, and bake in a moderate oven for a quarter of an hour.
Serve hot in the dish in which it was cooked.
A plain British macaroni cheese built on a small velouté of stock and milk rather than a straight béchamel, which gives it more savour and less weight than the American version. The quantities are modest — this is a supper dish for two or three, or a side for four.
- The gillA gill is a quarter of an Imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or 150 ml. Two gills — stock and milk together — give roughly 300 ml of liquid, which is right for a quarter-pound of macaroni.
- Macaroni quantityThe figure printed as "14 lb." is a quarter-pound, about 115 g dry macaroni. Read as fourteen pounds it makes no sense against four tablespoons of cheese.
- Boiling the macaroniHalf an hour was correct for the thick, unenriched dried macaroni of the period. Modern dried macaroni wants 7-9 minutes, and rather less if it is going on to bake — pull it a minute short of the packet time.
- Moderate ovenReckon on roughly 350F / 175C, though period 'moderate' covers something like 350-375F. Fifteen minutes is enough only to set the top and colour the crumbs; if the mixture has cooled while you assembled it, give it 25-30 minutes or the centre will be tepid.
- The sauceOnly one tablespoon of flour to two of butter and some 300 ml of liquid, so the sauce stays loose. The macaroni and the crumbs will take up some of it in the oven. Do not thicken it to a paste at the stove.
- InfusingThe stock and milk are brought to the boil with bay and onion and then strained, which is where the flavour comes from. Letting it stand off the heat ten minutes before straining draws more out than boiling it hard.
- The gratin dishA shallow earthenware or enamelled dish; something around a litre suits this quantity. Shallow helps, since the crumbs are laid both under and over the mixture.
- Cheese'Grated cheese' in an English book of this kind would most likely be a hard cheese such as Cheddar or Cheshire, though Parmesan was also common in macaroni dishes. Two ounces is about 55 g, and a good part of it goes on top -- increase it if you want a richer body to the sauce.
Casserole and gratin cookery of this sort belongs to a moment when British and American middle-class kitchens were absorbing French method in simplified form: a roux, an infused liquid, a buttered crumb top, all named with French words but executed with the plainest larder ingredients. Macaroni had been familiar in England since the eighteenth century, first as an expensive Italian import — often said to have arrived with Grand Tour travellers, though the line of descent is more commonplace than documented — and by 1900 as cheap dried pasta sold by the pound. The use of stock alongside milk marks this as a savoury supper dish rather than the milk-and-cheese nursery version, and the instruction to serve it in the dish in which it was cooked is characteristic of the book's whole premise — that the vessel goes to table, saving both washing-up and the heat of the food.