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Creamed Macaroni
4 ounces of pipe macaroni 1/2 ounce butter 1 onion Blade of mace 3 cloves 3 ounces grated cheese 1 gill cream 1/2 pint milk Seasoning Break the macaroni into small pieces, scald the onion, and stick cloves into it. Put the milk into a saucepan, add the macaroni and onion and mace, and cook for three-quarters of an hour; then take out the onion, cloves and mace, and add the cheese, butter and cream; let this simmer for five minutes, then put into a pie dish, sprinkle with rusk crumbs, and send to table very hot.
A milk-braised macaroni rather than a baked one: the pasta swells in seasoned milk, and cheese and cream go in only at the end. The one thing to watch is the cooking time, which belongs to a coarser, drier macaroni than anything on a supermarket shelf.
- Cut the 45 minutesThree-quarters of an hour applied to hard, thick-walled Victorian pipe macaroni. Modern dried macaroni will turn to paste; check at 12 minutes and expect 15 to 20, adding more milk as it is absorbed.
- MeasuresA gill is 5 fl oz in British books of this period, so a scant 2/3 cup of cream; 1/2 pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 cups. Together that is a lot of liquid for 4 oz (roughly 1 cup) of macaroni, which is the point — the pasta drinks most of it.
- Pipe macaroniLong, wide, straight tubes, sold in lengths and broken by hand. Large elbows or short ziti behave much the same; avoid anything ridged, which muddies the sauce.
- Scald the onionHere it means drop the peeled onion into boiling water for a minute or two to take the raw edge off, not to cook it through. It goes in whole, studded with the cloves, and comes out again.
- Blade of maceA curl of dried nutmeg aril, still sold whole in spice shops. A pinch of ground mace or grated nutmeg stirred in at the end is the practical substitute, since ground spice cannot be fished out.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only "grated cheese"; a firm, dry, sharp cheese such as Cheddar or Cheshire would be the usual English choice. Grate it fine and keep the pan at a bare simmer once it is in; hard cheese in hot milk will go stringy and weep fat if it boils.
- Rusk crumbsRusks are twice-baked bread, so these are dry, sandy crumbs rather than soft fresh ones. Coarse dried breadcrumbs or panko give the same effect; a few minutes under the broiler will colour them, though the original simply sends the dish out as is.
- YieldServes two as a main course or four as a side. Scorching is the only real hazard: keep the heat low and stir often, since milk with pasta in it catches quickly.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a run of books often placed around the First World War, when meat was scarce or dear and, by 1918 in Britain, rationed, and vegetarian eating was being argued for on grounds of thrift and health as much as principle. The idea that pasta plus dairy supplied the protein a chop otherwise would ran through domestic-science writing of the period. The technique fused with a clove-stuck onion and a blade of mace an essentially a b\the flavourings steeped directly in the cooking liquid instead of in a separately made sauce. Mace and cloves with milk and cheese was a standard English seasoning combination well into the twentieth century, and reads now as the clearest marker of the recipe's age.