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Macaroni and Cheese
Mrs. Frances Hoskins.
Boil 1 package of Fould's Macaroni and drain. Mash one package of Anona Pimento cheese in a saucepan. Add 1 T flour and sufficient milk to make a cream sauce. Cook over a slow fire until the cheese is thoroughly melted. Pour over macaroni, sprinkle with paprika and Rowena M. Nutt. serve.
A church-supper luncheon dish built entirely on branded convenience products, which makes the quantities vague by modern standards. A little translation gets it onto the table.
- The stray name"Rowena M. Nutt." appears to be a typesetting slip, most likely another contributor's credit that has landed in the middle of the last line. Read the ending as "sprinkle with paprika and serve."
- One package of macaroniThe recipe gives no weight, and period macaroni packages were smaller than today's 1 lb box. Assume something in the region of half a pound, which serves about four as a luncheon dish.
- Anona pimento cheeseA packaged pimento cheese of the period, no longer made. Substitute about 8 oz of pimento cheese spread, or 8 oz of processed American cheese with a drained 2 oz jar of chopped pimentos worked in. Aged cheddar alone will not behave the same way — processed cheese carries emulsifying salts that keep the sauce from breaking.
- The flour needs fatStirring dry flour into melted cheese gives a grainy sauce. Cook the tablespoon of flour in an equal amount of butter for a minute, whisk in about a cup of milk until it thickens, then add the cheese off direct heat.
- "A slow fire"Low heat, and it matters here. Cheese sauce held above a bare simmer tightens and weeps oil; take it off as soon as the cheese has gone smooth.
- Drain the pasta shortBoil the macaroni a minute shy of the package time. It sits in hot sauce afterwards and keeps softening.
- It is not bakedDespite the name, nothing goes into the oven — sauce over drained macaroni, paprika on top, straight to the table. For a browned top, run it under the broiler for two or three minutes with a handful of buttered crumbs.
Community cookbooks are the best record we have of how quickly branded groceries moved into home cooking. Fould's, a Midwestern macaroni maker, and packaged pimento cheese were both new enough that a contributor could name them as if they were ingredients in their own right — no weight, no description, just the box. Pimento cheese spread itself was a product of the same moment: cream and processed cheeses blended with imported and then domestically grown sweet peppers, sold in jars and foil-wrapped bricks and marketed hard for sandwiches and quick suppers. Macaroni and cheese was already an old dish in America by then, generally traced back through English cookery and served in fine houses since the early nineteenth century, but here it has been reduced to four sentences a church luncheon committee could execute at volume.