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Macaroni Salad
1 T onion (chopped fine) 2 or 3 hard boiled eggs salt 1 pkg. macaroni rings (or curly spaghetti) 1 cucumber diced Cook the rings in salted boiling water until tender. Drain in colander and blanch with cold water. Chill and mix with diced cucumber and minced onion and hard boiled eggs, saving one egg to slice over top of salad. Mix all with your favorite salad dressing.
Another combination is the spaghetti or macaroni rings with green peas, cooked carrots, celery and a bit of onion.
Mrs. A. L. Johnson.
A church-supper macaroni salad with no quantities beyond the eggs and the onion, which is typical of the genre — the cook was expected to judge by eye. A few notes on the vaguer instructions.
- "1 pkg. macaroni"Mid-century pasta was boxed in several sizes, 8 oz through a pound, so the package size is guesswork. Half a pound (about 8 oz dry, roughly 4 cups cooked) suits the two or three eggs and single cucumber given here.
- Macaroni ringsAnellini, the small ring cut, is still sold but not in every store. Ditalini, small elbows or short curly fusilli all behave the same way in a cold salad.
- "Blanch with cold water"Here blanch means rinse, not the modern sense of a brief plunge in boiling water. Running cold water over the drained pasta stops the cooking and washes off surface starch so the dressing does not turn gluey.
- Cook until tender, not al denteChilled pasta firms up considerably. Cook a minute past the package's low end or the salad will eat hard out of the refrigerator.
- Salt the water properlyThe recipe salts only the cooking water and relies on the dressing for the rest. Use a generous tablespoon of salt per gallon; rinsed pasta loses some of it.
- CucumberSlicing cucumbers can be seedy and watery. Seed the cucumber, or use an English or Persian cucumber, and salt the dice briefly and drain if you want the salad to hold overnight.
- "Your favorite salad dressing"In a parish book of this kind this means mayonnaise or boiled dressing, sometimes loosened with a spoonful of vinegar or pickle juice. Start with about 3/4 cup for a half pound of pasta and add more after chilling, since the pasta drinks it up.
- Yield and holdingAs written with half a pound of pasta it serves six to eight as a side. Keep it refrigerated and eat within two days; egg-and-mayonnaise salads should not sit out on a buffet more than two hours.
Macaroni salad set among the pickles and relishes, if that is where it sits in the book, suggests how the category was understood in a congregational cookbook: not preserves strictly, but the cold, sharp, made-ahead things that went on the table alongside the hot dishes. Cold dressed pasta became a fixture of American church suppers and picnics once boxed dry macaroni was cheap and commercial mayonnaise was widely available -- a dish that could be made the night before, carried in a covered bowl, and stretched by whatever was in the garden. Mrs. Johnson's second combination, with peas, cooked carrots, celery and onion, resembles a Russian-salad idea grafted onto pasta, and the invitation to use "your favorite salad dressing" is common in these books; contributors seem to have assumed readers already had a dressing they made without a recipe.