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Italian Macaroni and Cheese
1 cup of macaroni broken into small pieces 2 quarts boiling salted water 1/2 onion 2 cloves 1 1/2 cups tomato sauce 1/2 cup or more of grated cheese Cook the macaroni in the boiling salted water with the onion and cloves. Drain, remove the onion and cloves, reheat in tomato sauce, and serve with grated cheese.
A quick stovetop dish rather than a baked casserole: the macaroni is boiled, dressed in tomato sauce, and finished with cheese at the table.
- The hinge is the aromatic waterHalf an onion and two whole cloves in the cooking water are the only seasoning the pasta itself gets. Fish both out before draining, and salt the water properly — about a tablespoon for the 2 quarts.
- Pasta quantityA cup of dry macaroni is roughly 3 to 4 oz, which serves two modestly. Scale up by weight rather than volume if you are cooking for four or more.
- Cooking timeThe original gives none; macaroni of this period was commonly boiled 20 minutes or more to softness. Modern dried elbows want 7 to 9 minutes; cook to just tender, since it gets reheated in the sauce.
- Tomato sauceThis means a plain cooked tomato sauce, not a long-simmered ragù and not ketchup-style bottled sauce. A cup and a half of canned crushed tomatoes cooked down with a little oil and salt is the right register.
- Reheating in the sauceCombine over medium heat and toss for a minute or two so the pasta absorbs sauce. A splash of the starchy cooking water helps it cling.
- The cheeseIn a dish labelled Italian, 'grated cheese' most likely means Parmesan or a dry aged pecorino, though American books of the period sometimes meant a milder grating cheese. It is served with the dish rather than melted into the sauce.
- YieldTwo main servings or four side servings.
"Meatless cookery" books of the 1910s were not vegetarian manifestos so much as practical economy: they leaned heavily on cheese, eggs, beans and pasta as protein, and meat-sparing campaigns during the First World War gave the genre further impetus. The label "Italian" here signals the tomato sauce and hard grating cheese, in contrast to the white-sauce baked macaroni and cheese that American cookbooks of the same period commonly treated as the default. Macaroni had been sold in the United States for well over a century by then, but the tomato-and-Parmesan treatment spread more widely with Southern Italian immigration in the decades around 1900, and American writers were still marking it as foreign.