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Macaroni and Kidney Beans
1 cup macaroni 1 teaspoon salt 1 quart water 1/2 pint cream tomato sauce 1 can or 1 pint cooked kidney beans Break the macaroni into one-inch pieces. Cook in boiling salted water until the macaroni is soft enough to crush between the fingers, which will require from twenty minutes to one hour. When the macaroni is soft, drain and pour a cup of cold water through it. Prepare a cream tomato sauce as follows: 2 tablespoons flour 2 tablespoons butter 3/4 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup strained tomato Heat the milk to scalding, rub the butter and flour together, and pour slowly into in the hot milk. Set over the flame and cook for five minutes. Add the strained tomato, and turn into this sauce the thoroughly dried macaroni and the can of cooked kidney beans. If desired, more salt may be added. When these ingredients are thoroughly heated, drain into a vegetable dish, and serve. This dish should be stirred carefully, as the beans mash easily.
A straightforward pasta-and-bean supper bound in a thin tomato béchamel. Only the macaroni timing really needs rethinking; everything else translates directly.
- Ignore the cooking timeTwenty minutes to an hour, boiled until the pasta crushes between the fingers, produced the soft, fully collapsed macaroni the book expects. Modern extruded dried macaroni is done in 8-10 minutes; cook to the package time or a minute under, since it will be heated again in the sauce.
- The cold-water rinsePouring a cup of cold water through the drained macaroni stops the cooking and washes off surface starch. It is worth doing here because the sauce is already thickened with a roux and does not need pasta starch, but drain very thoroughly or the sauce will slacken.
- Strained tomatoThis means sieved fresh or canned tomatoes — passata is the closest modern equivalent. It is not tomato paste; substituting concentrate a quarter-cup at a time will overwhelm the milk. Thin paste with water to a pourable purée if that is all you have.
- The roux is rawButter and flour rubbed together and stirred into scalding milk is a beurre manié, not a cooked roux. The five minutes of cooking is the minimum needed to lose the floury taste; stir constantly and give it the full time.
- Add the tomato last, off the heatAdding the tomato at the end -- The strained tomato goes in after the sauce has cooked, which happens to be the safer order: acid stirred into hot milk early, or boiled hard afterwards, can curdle it. The recipe does not say to take the pan off the heat, and the assembled dish is meant to be heated through, so warm it gently rather than letting it bubble.
- Half a pint of sauceThe ingredient list calls for a half-pint (1 cup) of cream tomato sauce, and the sub-recipe makes roughly that. A pint of beans is more than one 15-oz can gives once drained (about 1 1/2 cups), so allow for a little extra.
- Stirring and servingFold with a rubber spatula, lifting from the bottom — canned kidney beans break down into mush under a spoon. "Drain into a vegetable dish" here means turn out; there is nothing left to drain off. Serves three to four as a main course.
- Season at the endBetween the salted cooking water, the sauce, and the canning liquid in the beans, salt levels vary widely. Taste after assembly. A grind of black pepper, absent from the original, does the dish no harm.
Meatless Cookery is generally dated to the mid-1910s, and it reflects the nutritional thinking of the moment: legumes, nuts, eggs and cheese were promoted as protein sources that could stand in for a chop, and pairing beans with a grain product like macaroni was standard advice, though the biochemistry of complementary amino acids would not be worked out for decades. The recipe's habit of boiling macaroni to complete softness was general in English-language cookbooks of the period.