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Boiled Macaroni
Cover the desired quantity of macaroni with boiling water and let stand half an hour, or until it softens; then drain, and put on to cook in equal portions of milk and water having enough to cover well. When it is tender and yields readily to pressure between the fingers, drain again. Dress with 1 cupful of hot cream, 1 tablespoonful of butter, salt and pepper to season; turn into a serving dish and cover thickly with grated cheese.
A soft, milky macaroni dressed at the table rather than baked — closer to a creamed pasta than to a gratin. Most of the adjustments come down to the fact that dried pasta is not what it was.
- Skip the soakThe half-hour steep in boiling water suited the long-dried, thick-walled macaroni of the period, which was sold in long tubes and took considerably longer to cook through than modern pasta. Modern extruded elbows or ziti need nothing but the pot; go straight to the milk-and-water.
- Milk and water, half and halfCooking in diluted milk gives the pasta a faint sweetness and a slightly cloudy, starchy surface that helps the cream cling. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir now and then — milk scorches on the bottom of the pan far more readily than water, and the pasta releases starch that settles.
- Judge by feel, not the clockThe original test — yielding readily to pressure between the fingers — is genuinely soft, well past al dente. That is the texture the dish was written for, but if you want it firmer, pull it two or three minutes earlier.
- Do not drain too thoroughlyA little of the milky liquid clinging to the macaroni makes the difference between a sauced dish and a dry one. Drain, but don't rinse or shake it out.
- The creamA cupful of hot cream is roughly 240 ml. The period's "cream" varied in richness, so a light or a heavy cream will both serve. Warm it before it goes on, or it will chill the pasta and set the butter into streaks.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" is left unspecified; a dry aged Cheddar or another hard, sharp grating cheese suits. It is added at the table and melts only from the residual heat, so grate it fine — a coarse shred will sit on top in cold shreds.
- Quantity and yieldThe recipe gives no measure for the macaroni. A cup of cream and a tablespoon of butter will dress about 8 oz (225 g) dry pasta generously, serving three to four as a side.
Macaroni appears in nineteenth-century American cookbooks as an economical, faintly genteel food — Italian in origin, but long since absorbed into English and then American cooking, where it was treated as a starch to be creamed and cheesed rather than sauced with tomato. Books of household economy liked it because it was cheap, kept indefinitely in the dry store, and stretched milk and cheese into a filling dish — a bulk starch, not pasta in the modern sense. The long preliminary soak is a fossil of a slower-cooking product: imported macaroni arrived very hard and very dry, and softening it before boiling is often said to have been common. The dressing of hot cream, butter and grated cheese is stirred through at the last moment rather than baked.