Home › Rice, Hominy, Cereals, Etc. › Macaroni à la Sorrent
Macaroni à la Sorrent
For 1½ of a package of macaroni, boiled and rinsed, chop fine ½ of a pound of raw fat ham; put it into a saucepan with 2 tablespoonfuls of finely chopped onion. Shake and stir frequently over a slow fire until cooked and slightly browned. Add the macaroni and 1 pint of tomato sauce, and simmer together for ten minutes. Turn into a heated dish and sprinkle with grated cheese.
A quick baked-free pasta dish that leans entirely on rendered fat ham and tomato. The success of it rests on cooking the ham slowly enough to render its fat before the macaroni goes in.
- QuantitiesThe fractions for the macaroni and the ham have not survived legibly in this printing; as printed, "1½ of a package" and "1½ of a pound" are not usable, and the likeliest readings are ½ of a package and ½ of a pound. That gives roughly 8 oz dry macaroni, 8 oz ham and 2 cups tomato sauce.
- Raw fat hamThis means ham that has not been cooked, and fatty: in a book of this period that could mean either fresh fatty pork or an uncooked cured ham, rather than the pink cooked ham sold sliced today. Diced pancetta or guanciale is a workable substitute; if you use cooked ham, add a spoonful of oil, since it will not render enough fat to soften the onion.
- "Slow fire"Low heat, and the point is to melt the fat out of the ham without scorching the onion. Ten to fifteen minutes of frequent stirring is realistic; the ham should be lightly coloured, not crisp.
- A pint of tomato sauceTwo cups. In a book of this period that means a plain cooked tomato purée or a tomato-based sauce made from stock and tomatoes, not a jarred pasta sauce with garlic and herbs. Canned crushed tomatoes, reduced a little, are closer to the original than most jars.
- Boiled and rinsedOlder instructions boiled macaroni until quite soft and then rinsed away the surface starch. Cook it just short of al dente instead, since it simmers another ten minutes in the sauce; rinsing is optional but does keep it from clumping while the ham cooks.
- Cheese"Grated cheese" here is most likely Parmesan or another dry aged cheese. The recipe sprinkles it over the heated dish at the finish rather than stirring it into the sauce.
- YieldWith the proportions above, three to four servings as a main dish, five or six as a side.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks routinely attached Italian place names to macaroni dishes as a shorthand for "tomato and cheese" — Naples, Milan, Sorrento — usually without much connection to what was actually cooked there. Sorrento sits on the peninsula south of Naples, in the heart of the region where dried macaroni was industrially made and where tomato sauce became its standard partner, so the label is at least pointed in the right direction. The telling ingredient is the ham: a small quantity of cheap fatty pork is used as a cooking fat and a seasoning at once, stretching a package of dried macaroni into a full meal. That logic — starch bulk, a little cured pork for flavour, tomato for acidity — is the backbone of frugal cooking on both sides of the Atlantic.