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Macaroni Loaf Filled with Meat
The macaroni is cooked until almost tender in salted water and then blanched in cold water and packed in a buttered mold, the center filled with minced turkey or meat warmed up in gravy.
It is then baked for twenty-five minutes in a hot oven, and when unmolded is served with a brown sauce and sprinkled over with grated cheese.
A leftovers dish written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what she was doing: no quantities, no pan size, no sauce recipe. The points below fill in what the original assumes.
- Quantities are absentNothing is specified. Scale to the mold you have: enough cooked macaroni to line it with a thick wall and cap the top, and enough minced meat in gravy to fill the well left in the centre.
- "Almost tender" means undercooked on purposeThe macaroni gets another 25 minutes in the oven. Pull it two to three minutes short of the package time or the loaf will collapse into paste when you turn it out.
- Blanching in cold waterHere this means shocking the drained macaroni under cold running water to stop the cooking and rinse off surface starch, not the modern sense of a brief boil. Drain it thoroughly afterward; wet macaroni will steam rather than set.
- A hot ovenIn period usage this means roughly 400-450F. Twenty-five minutes at that heat is enough to set the loaf and brown the edges, no more.
- The filling must go in hotTwenty-five minutes will not bring cold meat and gravy up through the middle of a packed mold. Warm the minced meat in its gravy to a simmer before it goes into the center.
- Packing the moldButter generously and line the bottom with a round of parchment. Press the macaroni firmly up the sides and across the base, leaving a well; the walls need to be thick enough, roughly an inch, to hold together. Cap the filling with more macaroni and press down.
- UnmoldingLet it stand five to ten minutes out of the oven before inverting. Straight from the heat it has no structure; left much longer it sticks.
- Brown sauceIn household cookery of this kind, a brown sauce is generally a browned roux moistened with beef stock, a simplified relative of the French espagnole. Pan gravy from the original roast does the same job and is closer to the spirit of the recipe.
Molded macaroni loaves belong to a run of economy cookery that dressed up leftovers into something that could be carried whole to the table. The technique is borrowed from the timbale and the rice border, French service ideas that American household writers simplified for domestic kitchens: a starch shell doing the work of pastry at a fraction of the cost. The mention of turkey is the giveaway that this is a day-after dish. Macaroni was regarded less as Italian food than as a plain, keeping pantry staple.