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Italian Macaroni No. I
3 ounces pipe macaroni 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 3 ounces grated cheese 2 ounces butter 1 teaspoon grated onion 1/4 pint white sauce Pepper and salt to taste Throw the macaroni into boiling water for twenty minutes, drain, and cut up into two-inch lengths; mix the parsley, butter, onion, and grated cheese with the sauce, then add the macaroni, put the mixture in a dish, and cover with bread crumbs, and put in the oven for half an hour. Serve with this some very thinly sliced Spanish onion, with a small cucumber cut up with it; cover with three tablespoons of oil, the juice of half a lemon, and a little cayenne pepper and salt.
A plain baked macaroni with cheese and a raw onion-and-cucumber salad alongside. Two things need attention: the pasta timing and the missing oven temperature.
- Boil the macaroni far lessTwenty minutes in boiling water was normal for the coarse, slow-drying macaroni of the period, but it will reduce modern dried pasta to paste, especially with another half hour in the oven. Boil 8 to 10 minutes, or two minutes short of the package time, and drain while still firm.
- Pipe macaroniThis simply means macaroni in tube form rather than a small elbow or ribbon shape; a straight tubular pasta is the nearest modern equivalent. Cutting the cooked tubes into two-inch lengths is only relevant if you buy the long uncut kind; short cut pasta needs no trimming.
- The quarter pint of white sauceAn imperial quarter pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. That is a modest amount of sauce for 3 ounces of pasta plus 3 ounces of cheese and 2 ounces of butter, so make it on the loose side or the dish will bake dry.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350 to 375F, for 30 minutes will heat it through and brown the crumbs; if the top is pale at the end, finish briefly under the broiler.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" is unspecified; a dry Cheddar or Parmesan would both suit the dish. 3 ounces is roughly three-quarters of a cup grated.
- Butter the crumbsDry breadcrumbs scattered on top will scorch in patches. Toss them with a little of the butter, or a spoonful held back from the 2 ounces, before covering the dish.
- Grated onionA teaspoon of onion grated on the fine side of a box grater, juice included. It is there for sharpness against the cheese, and raw grated onion is stronger than chopped, so do not increase it.
- The saladThree tablespoons of oil to the juice of half a lemon is a fairly rich dressing; slice the Spanish onion paper-thin and dress it 10 minutes ahead so it softens. It is served alongside the hot dish, uncooked and undressed of anything warm.
- Yield3 ounces of dry macaroni is a small amount: enough for one as a light main course, or two as a side. Scale up in whole multiples rather than stretching the sauce.
Meatless cookbooks of this kind proliferated in Britain and America between the 1880s and the end of the First World War, driven partly by vegetarian and food-reform movements and partly, later, by wartime meat shortages; in a dish like this cheese and butter stand in for the protein and richness of a joint. Macaroni had been familiar in English kitchens since the eighteenth century, when it arrived largely as an Italian luxury for travelled gentlemen, and by 1900 it was cheap, shelf-stable and firmly domesticated into baked cheese dishes. The "Italian" in the title signals origin rather than authenticity: the long boil, the white sauce, the breadcrumb crust and the numbered variants are all English conventions of the period. The raw onion and cucumber salad on the side, dressed with oil and lemon, is the one Mediterranean gesture in the whole recipe.