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Macaroni and Cheese
In a saucepan have fully 3 quarts of boiling salted water. Into this drop ½ package of macaroni broken in two-inch pieces, cover until at a fast boil then partly uncover and keep boiling hard until tender. Drain in a colander. On a hot platter put alternate layers of the macaroni and grated cheese, sprinkling each layer with melted butter. Turn through with two forks and serve at once. This may be changed by substituting a nice meat sauce or a strained tomato sauce for the butter.
This is the older, stovetop form of macaroni and cheese: boiled pasta tossed with grated cheese and butter on a hot platter, with no baked crumb top at all. It is quick, and it depends entirely on heat retention.
- "Half a package"Macaroni was sold loose or in boxes of varying weight, so this is genuinely imprecise. Half a modern 1 lb box, 8 oz dry, serves four as a side and is the sensible reading.
- Two-inch piecesThe instruction to break the macaroni indicates long straight tubes rather than the elbows now usual; modern elbow macaroni goes in as it comes.
- Cooking timeThe instruction is simply to boil hard "until tender", with no time given. Current dry macaroni needs 7-9 minutes, tasted from about 6, and should keep some bite since it gets no further cooking.
- The hinge: heatNothing here melts the cheese but residual heat, so the platter must be genuinely hot and the macaroni must go on straight from the colander without rinsing. A cold dish gives you dry pasta with gritty shreds on it.
- CheeseThe recipe does not name a cheese; a firm aged Cheddar or a dry grating cheese suits the method. Pre-shredded cheese is coated with anti-caking starch and melts poorly on residual heat; grate it yourself, and grate it fine.
- ButterAllow roughly 3 tablespoons melted butter and 6-8 oz grated cheese for 8 oz of dry macaroni. The recipe gives no amounts at all.
- The sauce variation"A nice meat sauce" would most likely have been a plain brown gravy or a simple minced-meat sauce rather than a long-simmered ragu. Strained tomato sauce means tomatoes cooked down and passed through a sieve to remove skins and seeds.
- YieldFour as a side dish, two or three as a supper main with bread and a salad.
Macaroni appears in American cookbooks early in the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period often grouped it with starches such as rice and hominy. The recipe's shape follows from that: a plain boiled starch dressed with butter and cheese, closer to the buttered-noodle end of the tradition than to the custard-bound baked macaroni pies that also circulated at the time. The baked version, thickened with a white sauce or eggs and browned under crumbs, needed an oven; the tossed platter here does not.