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Baked Macaroni
Prepare boiled macaroni. Drain, arrange in layers in a buttered baking dish with white sauce and cheese. Cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century American books, which assumed the cook already had boiled macaroni and white sauce in hand. The proportions are left to you, so the notes below fill in what the page omits.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given at all; the page leaves it to the cook's judgement. A moderate oven, about 375F, until the crumbs are well browned and the sauce bubbles at the edges, roughly 25-30 minutes for a shallow dish of already-hot components.
- Working quantitiesFor a 2-quart dish: 8 oz dry macaroni, about 2 cups white sauce, 4-6 oz grated cheese, and 1 cup crumbs tossed with 2 tablespoons melted butter. That serves four to six as a main dish.
- White sauceA medium white sauce of this period runs about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt. Make it slightly looser than you think you need, since the macaroni keeps absorbing liquid in the oven.
- The macaroniPeriod macaroni was generally long tubes broken into lengths, and period directions often call for boiling 20 minutes or more. Cook yours a minute or two short of al dente; it finishes in the sauce.
- The cheeseAn unspecified "cheese" in an American book of this period most likely meant a firm factory cheddar. A sharp aged cheddar works well; if it is very dry, grate it fine so it melts into the sauce rather than breaking into oil.
- Buttered crumbsCrumbs of bread tossed in melted butter rather than anything packaged; soft fresh crumbs brown faster than you expect. If they colour before the interior is hot, tent with foil.
- AssemblyLayer sauce first so the bottom does not scorch, then macaroni, then cheese, repeating and finishing with sauce under the crumbs. Cheese left exposed on top under the crumb layer tends to go leathery.
Baked macaroni with a milk sauce and cheese was, by the early twentieth century, thoroughly domesticated household food rather than anything exotic. Dried macaroni had been an expensive Italian import in the early nineteenth century, associated with Jefferson and with fashionable tables; American and British factory production through the later 1800s dropped the price until it sat comfortably in the cheap-supper chapters of general cookbooks. The recipe's extreme brevity is characteristic of the era's cookery instruction: white sauce and boiled macaroni were treated as foundation skills learned earlier in the book, so the author only had to describe the assembly.