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Macaroni with White Sauce
Boil and rinse the macaroni. Have ready ½ as much white sauce. Fill a greased dish with alternate layers of macaroni and sauce. Cover the top with dry bread crumbs mixed with a little melted butter and brown in a hot oven.
A skeleton recipe of the kind economy cookbooks printed for cooks who already knew the basics. The proportions are given by ratio rather than weight, so scale it to whatever dish you have.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. For a 1½-quart baking dish, figure on about 8 oz dry macaroni (roughly 4 cups cooked) and 2 cups white sauce, reading the "½ as much" as volume against the cooked, drained macaroni; the original does not say which measure it means.
- White sauceA common medium formula of the period is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and pepper. A medium sauce suits this dish; a thin one will pool at the bottom.
- "Hot oven"425–450°F. At that heat the crumbs colour in 10–15 minutes, which is all this needs since everything in the dish is already cooked.
- Boil and rinseThe rinse washes off surface starch, which helps the pieces stay separate in the layers. Boil to just tender, since the dish gets more heat in the oven.
- CrumbsDry crumbs, not fresh, tossed with about a tablespoon of melted butter per cup. Fresh crumbs absorb the sauce and turn pasty rather than crisp.
- CheeseThere is none. Grated cheese stirred into the sauce turns the dish into macaroni and cheese, which cookbooks of the period generally printed as a separate recipe.
- YieldFour servings as a main dish, six as a side.
Baked macaroni layered with a milk-and-flour sauce was the American economy dish of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a starch stretched with milk to fill a plate cheaply. The white sauce itself descends from the French béchamel, though by this period American cookbooks taught it as a plain butter-flour-milk formula memorised in ratios and applied to everything from creamed vegetables to fish, which is why a recipe like this one could assume the reader already had it "ready."