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Mackerel and Sea Fish (Fork because the contact)
fork, because the contact of steel imparts a bad taste, particularly if with a seasoning of tomatoes. For persons unaccustomed to eat their long Macaroni after the clever fashion of the Neapolitans, by twisting it round and round the fork, the advice not to cut it with a steel knife is especially needful.
Dressed Macaroni is a mixture of flour, cheese, and butter; and it therefore bears (as some say) the Italian name Macrhetone, a fool, or blockhead. This is after the same fashion of naming a clown, when taken as typical of his country, by a popular dish therein, such as English Jack Pudding, German Hanswürst, or Jack Sausage, or French Jean Farine, Jack Flour. The Macaroni of smaller size is called Vermicelli (little worms). An admixture of such a cereal food as Macaroni with cheese makes the latter more easy to be digested. Both Macaroni, and Vermicelli, are prepared in the greatest perfection at Naples, where they form a principal item in the food of the population. Spaghetti is an Italian Macaroni, made into cords smaller than that of Naples, and larger than Vermicelli.
To make a Macaroni and marmalade pudding, take a quarter of a pound of Macaroni, three eggs, three ounces of sugar, a very little spice of cinnamon, or nutmeg, with some orange or apricot marmalade. Boil the Macaroni till tender, drain away the water, pour over it a little milk, and allow it to cool. When cold, mix into it the eggs, sugar, and a tiny dust of the spice. Put a layer of the mixture in a pie dish, then a layer of the marmalade, and then the remainder of the Macaroni: and bake in the oven for fifteen or twenty minutes. The Macaroni should be gently boiled for one hour. Macaroni, and other sorts of Italian paste, contain only about 9 per cent of nitrogenous substances; if a healthy, well-fed man were to live exclusively on Macaroni, he would lose weight, because having to subsidize proteids from his own resources; but an addition to the Macaroni of eggs, or meat, would prevent this deficiency.
Buried in this digression on Neapolitan pasta is a genuine recipe: a baked macaroni and marmalade pudding. The instructions are scattered and partly contradictory, so read them together before starting.
- The contradiction to settle firstThe recipe says to boil the macaroni "till tender," then adds at the end that it "should be gently boiled for one hour." The hour presumably suits the coarser dried pasta of the period; modern dried macaroni is tender in 8 to 10 minutes. Boil it soft rather than al dente, since it will not soften much further in the pudding.
- Quantities in modern termsA quarter of a pound of macaroni is 4 oz (about 1 cup dry elbows); three ounces of sugar is a scant half cup. The marmalade is unmeasured — about half a cup, spread in a single layer, suits this quantity.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for an egg-set pudding. Fifteen to twenty minutes will not set three eggs in a deep pie dish; bake until the centre is just firm and no longer wobbles, likely 35 to 45 minutes.
- Cool the macaroni properlyThe instruction to pour milk over the drained macaroni and let it cool is the hinge. Mixing eggs into hot pasta scrambles them, and the pudding sets grainy instead of custardy. The quantity of milk is vague — around half a cup, enough to coat.
- LayeringAs written the layers are macaroni, marmalade, macaroni. Keep the marmalade off the sides of the dish or it scorches at the edges before the centre sets.
- The steel fork warningThis applies to the steel cutlery of the period, which the writer says reacted with acidic seasonings such as tomato. Stainless steel does not, so ignore it.
- YieldRoughly four modest servings, best warm. It is closer to a sweet baked pasta pudding than to a custard, and dense once chilled.
This passage comes from a book of the "meals medicinal" genre, in which Victorian and Edwardian physicians catalogued foods for their supposed therapeutic value — hence the closing note that pasta carries "only about 9 per cent of nitrogenous substances," a very period way of saying it is low in protein and needs eggs or meat alongside it. That figure reflects the protein-obsessed nutritional chemistry of the late nineteenth century, when diets were scored chiefly by their nitrogen content. The etymology offered here is folk etymology: linking maccherone to a blockhead is a traditional joke rather than a documented derivation, though the Italian word maccherone did come to mean a dolt, and the English "macaroni" for an over-dressed young man is a separate eighteenth-century usage. Sweet baked pasta puddings of this kind are said to have been familiar in British cookery of the period, when macaroni was still treated as much as a milk-pudding grain as a savoury staple.