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Macaroni Rarebit
Boil 2 ounces of macaroni until tender then drain well. Melt 1 tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan, blend with it 1 tablespoonful of flour, moisten with 4 tablespoonfuls of cream, add 4 tablespoonfuls of grated cheese, 1/4 teaspoonful of mustard, a dash of cayenne, salt to season, and, a little at a time, 1 cupful of hot milk. When smooth, stir in the macaroni, mix well and serve at once.
A small, thrifty macaroni cheese built on a roux rather than eggs, and closer to a Welsh rarebit sauce than to a baked casserole. The whole thing comes together in the time the pasta boils.
- The hinge: add the milk graduallyThe sauce is a flour-thickened base loosened with a full cup of hot milk. Pour it in slowly and stir between additions, or the roux will seize into lumps that no amount of beating will smooth out. Warming the milk first keeps the sauce from stalling.
- Cheese off the heat, or nearlyThe original adds cheese before the milk, which works if the pan is barely simmering. Aggressive heat after the cheese goes in makes it string and weep oil. Keep the pan on low from that point and stop cooking as soon as it is smooth.
- Quantities and yieldTwo ounces of dry macaroni is roughly a scant half cup, and four tablespoons of grated cheese is about an ounce. This serves one generously or two as a side, and doubles readily; larger multiples may need the milk held back and judged by eye.
- What kind of cheeseThe recipe does not say, but a firm yellow cheese of the sort American cooks called "store cheese" is the likeliest intention; a cheddar is the direct equivalent, sharp if you want the flavour to carry. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that dulls the texture.
- CreamUnqualified "cream" in older recipes covered a wide range of fat contents. Either heavy cream or half-and-half will do here; heavy cream gives a richer sauce and is more forgiving of heat.
- Mustard and cayenneA quarter teaspoon measured as a dry quantity points to mustard powder rather than prepared mustard. Both it and the cayenne read as seasoning against the fat rather than as heat.
- Boil the macaroni properly saltedNothing else in the dish seasons the pasta, and the sauce is mild. Salt the cooking water well, and drain thoroughly — trapped water thins the sauce fast.
- Serve at onceThis means it. A roux sauce this thin sets and skins as it cools, and reheated it separates. There is no baking step and no browning; it goes from pan to plate.
Rarebit — the cheese-and-mustard sauce of Welsh rarebit, thinned with milk or ale and poured over toast — was one of the most reliable cheap suppers in Anglo-American cooking, and American cookbooks came to apply the name fairly loosely to dishes served under a cheese sauce. Putting it over macaroni rather than toast suits a household economy book: two ounces of pasta and an ounce of cheese feed a person at very little cost, and the flour-and-butter roux stretches a small amount of dairy a long way. Macaroni was commonly filed with the starches and grains as a cheap bulking food rather than treated as Italian cooking. As for the name, "Welsh rabbit" is the earlier recorded form and "rarebit" is generally treated as a later alteration of it; the familiar gloss that the "rabbit" was a joke about meatless food standing in for meat is traditional and much repeated rather than established.