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Boiled Macaroni
Break in inch pieces and wash. Cook in boiling salted water until tender. Drain, season with salt, pepper, and butter, and serve hot.
A bare-bones formula from a period when macaroni came as long, straw-like tubes sold loose by weight rather than in pre-cut boxes. Almost everything here is a matter of supplying the quantities the original leaves out.
- The pasta itself"Macaroni" here clearly means long hollow tubes, which is why the first instruction is to break them. Modern elbow macaroni or any short tubular shape needs no breaking; skip straight to the water.
- WashingThe rinse was most likely to remove dust and flour from pasta stored and handled loose. Boxed dried pasta today is clean, and rinsing before cooking only washes away surface starch that helps sauce cling.
- QuantitiesNone are given. Reckon 8 oz dried macaroni, 4 quarts water and about 1 tablespoon salt, which serves four as a side dish.
- Salted waterSalt the water properly; this is the pasta's main chance to be seasoned internally, and undersalted water is one reason boiled macaroni can taste flat no matter how much butter goes in afterward.
- "Until tender"Period cookbooks often meant genuinely soft, sometimes twenty minutes or more. Start testing at the lower end of the package time, around 8 minutes for elbows, and pull it while there is still a little resistance.
- Draining and dressingDo not rinse after draining, and dress it while it is steaming hot so the butter melts into it. Two tablespoons of butter for 8 oz of pasta is about right, with pepper ground over at the table.
- ServingTreat it as a plain starch to go beside a roast or boiled meat rather than as a dish in itself. Reserve a few spoonfuls of the cooking water if the pasta looks dry once buttered.
Macaroni reached American tables as an Italian import long before large-scale Italian immigration, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was a respectable, faintly genteel food sold dried in long tubes at grocers. American cookbooks of the period commonly treated it as a starchy accompaniment in the same category as boiled potatoes or rice, not the foundation of a meal. Maria Willett Howard's Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and while its reputation rests on the confectionery chapters, it carries a full complement of plain household recipes like this one, given in a terse shorthand.