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Macaroni with Sauce
Prepare as for Boiled Macaroni. Drain, and reheat in cream sauce, tomato sauce, or Béchamel sauce.
A cross-reference rather than a full recipe: Lowney's expects you to have already read "Boiled Macaroni" a few entries earlier and to keep a sauce repertoire in your head. Both assumptions need filling in.
- What "Boiled Macaroni" meantTurn-of-the-century instructions called for breaking the long tubes into short lengths and boiling them in a large volume of well-salted water, often 20 to 30 minutes, then draining and sometimes rinsing. Modern dried pasta is a different product; cook to the package time, or a minute short of it, since it finishes in the sauce.
- The macaroni itselfAt this date "macaroni" covered hollow tubes of various lengths, often sold loose by weight rather than pre-packed in the short elbows familiar today. Elbows, ziti or penne all suit the method.
- QuantitiesNone are given. Half a pound of dried pasta to roughly two cups of sauce serves four as a side dish; a standard white sauce of that period works out at about two tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of liquid, so you will need roughly double that.
- Cream sauce vs. BechamelIn cookbooks of this period cream sauce is generally a white sauce built on milk or thin cream alone, while Bechamel is the same roux moistened with white stock as well as milk, giving more savour. They are not interchangeable in flavour, only in method.
- Reheating without gluingAdd the drained pasta to the hot sauce rather than the sauce to the pasta, and keep it over low heat. If it has been rinsed and cooled it will absorb liquid greedily, so hold back a little sauce and loosen at the end with pasta water or milk.
- Tomato sauce cautionPeriod tomato sauces were often thinned with stock, and tended to be looser than a modern jarred sauce. If yours is thick, slacken it before the macaroni goes in or the dish will be stodgy.
- If you want it brownedThis entry stops at the saucepan; a baked, browned macaroni and cheese would be a separate recipe, so adding cheese here is a departure rather than an omission.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and, like other cookbooks issued by food and confectionery firms, it surrounded its chocolate pages with a general course of cookery. That helps account for the extreme brevity of an entry like this one, which exists mainly to point the reader back to the boiled macaroni and sauce entries -- a terse, cross-referenced style widely associated with Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Anglo-American cookery of the period commonly treated macaroni as one of the boiled, sauced accompaniments to meat, and it was often recommended as an economical dish; Italian immigration was reshaping American pasta cookery in these years, but domestic-science books were slower to follow, sticking to white sauce, cheese and a thin tomato sauce.