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Macaroni Baked with Tomatoes
Arrange layers of cooked macaroni, stewed and seasoned tomato, and chopped green pepper. Dot each layer with butter. Cover all with buttered cracker crumbs. Bake in hot oven.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in 1907 cookbooks, where the author assumes you already know how much macaroni feeds four and what a hot oven looks like. The quantities are yours to set; the technique is fixed.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" in this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat the crumb topping should brown in roughly 20-25 minutes, which is about all the time the dish needs since everything in it is already cooked.
- The hinge: drain the tomatoStewed tomato carries a great deal of water, and layered wet it will leave the macaroni sitting in liquid. Reduce the tomato until it mounds on a spoon before assembling, or the crumbs will be brown on top and sodden underneath.
- Macaroni of the periodEarly-1900s macaroni was often a thick hollow tube sold in long straight lengths and broken up by hand, though shorter cut and elbow forms were also on sale; period directions boil it considerably softer than we would now. Elbows or rigatoni stand in fine; cook them a minute short of al dente since they will absorb tomato in the oven.
- Cracker crumbsButtered cracker crumbs means common crackers or soda crackers rolled fine and tossed with melted butter, roughly a tablespoon of butter to a half cup of crumbs. Unsalted saltines are the nearest thing on a shelf today; panko browns similarly but tastes less of the crackerbox.
- Green pepper, rawThe pepper goes in raw and chopped, and in a 25-minute bake it stays assertive and slightly crunchy. Sweating it in butter first gives a rounder flavor if you would rather it disappear into the tomato.
- Seasoning"Seasoned tomato" is left undefined here; salt and pepper are the minimum, and period stewed-tomato seasonings often included a little sugar to correct acidity and sometimes onion. Season the tomato fully before layering, as nothing else in the dish carries salt.
- Yield and dishAs one workable scaling, a pound of dry macaroni with three or more cups of stewed tomato will fill a 9x13 dish and serve about eight as a side. Let it stand ten minutes out of the oven so the layers hold when cut.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like many branded cookbooks of the era it padded its chocolate and cocoa formulas with a full run of ordinary household cookery. A plain macaroni dish is of a piece with that: macoroni was often treated as a meat-stretcher rather than a course of its own, and American cooks of the period commonly reached for the tomato-and-cheese or tomato-and-crumb treatment. Canned tomatoes, cheap and reliable from roughly the 1880s onward, made the dish a year-round standby, and the buttered cracker crumb topping was one of the standard American gratin crusts, used alongside buttered breadcrumbs.