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Macaroni and Cheese Pudding
4 ounces macaroni 3 ounces grated cheese 4 sage leaves 1 pound Spanish onions 1 ounce white bread crumbs Pepper and salt to taste Break the macaroni into three and a half inch lengths, and a half inch lengths, and put into boiling water, boiling for half an hour; then drain, and when cool, line a well-buttered pudding basin with the macaroni, and fill in with the following mixture: Scald the onion, and chop very finely with the sage leaves, add the cheese and bread crumbs, and mix well. Fill the basin with this, and cover with macaroni, then a cloth, and steam for three hours. Rice may take the place of macaroni for a change.
If rice is used cook as for plain boiled rice in salted water and put in the baking dish in the same way as the macaroni.
A steamed savoury pudding of the British type, lined with pasta rather than pastry. Two of its numbers — the half-hour boil on the macaroni and the three-hour steam — belong to an era of soft-cooked pasta and unreliable heat, and both can come down considerably.
- The hinge: the onions do the cookingThe hinge: the onions do much of the cooking -- The onions are only scalded before they go in, so a good part of the long steam is there to bring a pound of barely-cooked onion through to sweetness. Sweat the chopped onion in butter until soft and translucent before mixing, and 1 to 1½ hours of steaming should be enough to set the pudding.
- Macaroni: 8 to 10 minutes, not 30Half an hour in boiling water was normal for the coarse dried macaroni of the day. Modern extruded pasta cooked that long will disintegrate and cannot be handled into a lining. Boil until just pliable but still firm, drain, and rinse in cold water so the pieces stay separate.
- The garbled length"Three and a half inch lengths, and a half inch lengths" is a typesetting slip repeated in the original. Cut lengths of roughly 2 to 3 inches: long enough to lie against the basin wall, short enough to curve with it.
- Pudding basinA 1½-quart heatproof bowl, generously buttered. Cover with buttered parchment and foil, or a floured cloth tied under the rim, and stand it on a trivet in a covered pan with water reaching halfway up the sides. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- Spanish onionsLarge mild yellow onions, still sold under that name. One pound is one very large onion or two medium — a substantial proportion against 4 ounces of pasta, and the reason the pudding reads as an onion dish.
- Cheese and sageThe recipe does not name a cheese; a dry English type such as Cheddar, Cheshire or Lancashire suits it, grated fine so it melts into the onion rather than pooling. Four fresh sage leaves is roughly ¼ to ½ teaspoon dried rubbed sage; more than that will dominate.
- BreadcrumbsOne ounce is roughly ½ cup of fresh soft crumbs, and they are binder, not topping. Use bread that has dried a day, not packaged dry crumbs, which absorb more liquid.
- Yield and servingServes three as a light main course with a green vegetable, four as a side. Rest the basin 5 minutes before turning out; a steamed pudding this soft will slump if inverted straight from the heat.
Books titled Meatless Cookery appeared in the English-speaking world in the era of the First World War, when governments urged households toward meatless days to free up meat for armies and export, though the title also turns up in health and vegetarian publishing outside the war years. A "Meat Substitutes" chapter in such a book would be doing a specific job: supplying dishes with enough protein, bulk and savour to occupy the centre of the plate where a joint or chop would have sat. The form here is older than the war, though a pudding basin, sealed under a floured cloth, was one common way to cook a substantial dish on a range with limited oven capacity, and lining the basin with macaroni is simply the pastry crust of a meat pudding done without flour or suet. The pairing of onion, sage and hard cheese is long-established in British cookery, and this pudding sits close to the older tradition of sage-and-onion stuffings and Welsh rabbit, redirected into something that would satisfy as a dinner in its own right.