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Curried Macaroni
4 ounces macaroni 2 ounces of butter 3 ounces cooked rice 1 large onion 2 tablespoons curry powder 1/2 pint water Break the macaroni into two-inch lengths, throw into boiling water, and cook for twenty minutes, then drain; slice the onion, and fry a golden brown in the butter, add the curry powder, also the water, and let them cook for fifteen minutes in the frying pan, then pass all through a sieve, and add to the macaroni, and let it cook for half an hour. Cook the rice, and with this make a border around the dish, and put the curried macaroni inside, and serve very hot.
A wartime meatless dish built on two starches and a curry-onion sauce. The proportions work, but the cooking times were written for the soft, fully collapsed pasta of the period.
- The hinge: total pasta cooking timeTwenty minutes of boiling followed by half an hour in the sauce will reduce modern extruded macaroni to paste. Boil it several minutes short of al dente, then give it eight to ten minutes in the sauce to absorb flavour and finish.
- Weights to volume4 oz macaroni is about 1 cup dry; 2 oz butter is 4 tablespoons; 3 oz rice is a scant half cup uncooked. A half pint of water is 1 cup (10 fl oz if the book's measure is imperial).
- The rice is ambiguousThe list says "3 ounces cooked rice" but the method says "cook the rice." Taken as a cooked weight it gives only a token border, so it is probably simplest to weigh the three ounces raw; three ounces uncooked yields roughly a cup and a half cooked.
- Curry powder quantityTwo tablespoons for four ounces of pasta is assertive by any standard, and commercial blends varied then as now, so the heat is unpredictable. Start with one tablespoon and taste before adding more.
- Fry the powder, do not scorch itThe instruction to add the curry powder to the browned onion and butter before the water is deliberate: the spices need a minute in fat to lose their raw edge. Keep the heat moderate, as the ground spice burns quickly and turns bitter.
- SievingPushing the cooked onion through a sieve gives a smooth, slightly thickened sauce. A blender or stick blender does the same job in seconds; if you skip it entirely the dish is coarser but not wrong.
- SeasoningNo salt is listed anywhere, as is often the case in recipes of this kind. Salt the pasta water and the sauce, or the finished dish will taste flat under all that spice.
- YieldServes two as a main course or four as a side, plated with the rice ring around the outside as directed.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the flood of home-front cookbooks published around the First World War, when meat, wheat and fat were being conserved and "meatless days" were promoted as a patriotic duty in Britain and the United States alike. Curry powder was the obvious tool for such a book: commercial blends were advertised by London grocers from the late eighteenth century and were long used to give body and interest to cheap, bland material. The rice border is a piece of standard Victorian and Edwardian service, a way of making a plain dish look composed on the plate. What the recipe really shows is the period's approach to a meatless main course, which was not to imitate meat but to make starch, fat and spice carry the meal on their own.