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Scalloped Spinach and Macaroni
Scalloped spinach and macaroni is an Italian combination of decided merit. Pick over and wash the spinach carefully, then boil in salted water until tender; drain, pressing with considerable force that it may be as dry as possible, then put through the food chopper. Boil 1/3 of a package of macaroni in salted water until tender, turn into a colander and rinse with cold water; let stand to drain, then cut in two-inch lengths.
Hard boil 2 eggs and heat ½ cupful of brown sauce or gravy. Mix this with the spinach and season well. In a deep, buttered dish put alternate layers of the macaroni, spinach, chopped eggs and grated cheese until the dish is filled.
Have cheese on top, dot with bits of butter and bake in a hot oven until browned.
A straightforward layered bake that depends almost entirely on how dry the spinach is before it goes into the dish. Everything else is assembly.
- Press the spinach hardBoiled spinach holds an astonishing amount of water, and any that survives will pool under the macaroni and turn the layers soupy. Wring it in a clean towel rather than just pressing it in a sieve, then chop.
- The food chopperA hand-cranked grinder clamped to the table. A few pulses in a food processor, or simply chopping the pressed spinach on a board, gives the same texture; do not purée it.
- Quantity of macaroniThe original fraction of a package has not survived legibly in this copy, and the recipe never states a quantity of spinach either. As a working guess, about 6 oz dry macaroni with roughly 2 lb fresh spinach will fill a 2-quart dish.
- Brown sauceA period brown sauce is butter and flour cooked to a nut colour, then loosened with meat stock. Half a cup of any decent gravy or a thin beef-stock roux does the job; it is there to bind the spinach, so keep it thick.
- Cheese"Grated" implies a firm cheese; Parmesan or a dry aged provolone suits the dish, though an American book of this date may well have meant a grated hard cheddar. A young mozzarella will release water and undo the draining work.
- Hot ovenRead that as somewhere around 400-450F. The components all go in cooked, so the bake is only to heat through and brown the top -- check from about 15 minutes on.
- Rinsing the macaroniThe cold rinse is deliberate: it stops the cooking and keeps the pieces separate through the layering. Drain it well or you reintroduce the water you just squeezed out of the spinach.
- YieldWith no legible quantities in the original, yield can only be estimated: something like four as a main course with bread, or six as a side.
Recipes of this kind are the sort that appear in American cheap-cookery books, where "an Italian combination" was a fashionable way to sell macaroni to households that still thought of pasta as a novelty. Scalloping -- layering a cooked filling with a starch or crumb and browning it under cheese or butter -- was one of the standard economical techniques, and it let a cook stretch a small amount of gravy, cheese and eggs across a whole dish of vegetables. The two hard-boiled eggs and the half cup of brown sauce are doing the work that meat would have done in a richer book: supplying protein, fat and savour at almost no cost.