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Macaroni and Tomato Sauce No. 2
8 ounces macaroni 2 ounces butter 1/2 pint milk 1 Spanish onion 1 lb. Of tomatoes Pepper and salt to taste Break the macaroni into pieces, and throw it into boiling water, and boil for an hour. Make a sauce by putting the milk, butter and the onion, scalded and grated, into a saucepan, with the pepper and salt. Scald the tomatoes, skin them, and rub them through a hair sieve, and add to the sauce. Add all to the macaroni, and well mix. Serve very hot, with grated Parmesan cheese, separately.
A plain milk-and-tomato sauce of the sort that carried a meatless dinner in the era before canned passata. Two instructions need changing outright: the boiling time and the order in which the tomato meets the milk.
- Boil the macaroni far lessBoiling times of up to an hour appear in cookery books of this period. Modern dried macaroni is done in 8-11 minutes; taste at 8.
- Half a pintIn a British book this is an imperial half-pint, 10 fluid ounces or about 1 1/4 cups. If you are working from American measures it would be 1 cup, and the sauce will simply be a little thicker.
- CurdlingAcidic tomato pulp dropped into hot milk will separate. Warm the milk, butter and onion gently without boiling, take the pan off the heat, then stir the tomato purée in; or heat the tomato separately and combine off the heat just before serving.
- Scalded and grated onionScalding means a brief plunge in boiling water to take the raw bite off. Grating a whole Spanish onion gives you pulp and juice rather than pieces, which is the point: the sauce is meant to be smooth.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh sieve or a food mill does the same job. Scald the tomatoes 30 seconds to loosen the skins, then press the flesh through and discard skin and seeds.
- The sauce will be thinThere is no flour or reduction here, so expect a loose coating rather than a clinging sauce. Simmering the tomato pulp down by a third before it meets the milk gives a better result without altering the character.
- Quantities and yieldA pound of tomatoes is roughly three medium ones. As written this serves three as a main dish or four as a side.
- Cheese apartThe recipe hands the Parmesan round separately, as many such recipes do, which lets each eater decide; it also lets the dish stay meatless for anyone avoiding animal rennet, which Parmigiano-Reggiano still requires.
Meatless cookery books proliferated in Britain and America in the later nineteenth century, driven by the vegetarian societies, by temperance-adjacent health reform, and later by wartime shortage. Macaroni recommended itself to such books because it was cheap, kept indefinitely in the dry store, and — served with milk, butter and cheese — could be argued to supply the protein that a joint of meat otherwise would. That reasoning may well account for the milk in this sauce, which strikes a modern eye as odd next to tomato: on such a view it is there as nourishment as much as flavour. The habit of numbering variants ("No. 2") is typical of these compilations.