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Macaroni Pudding
6 ounces macaroni 1 ounce of butter 1 pint of milk A little grated nutmeg Break the macaroni into small pieces, and throw into boiling water, and keep it boiling for half an hour, drain it well, and return to the saucepan, add the milk, butter and nutmeg, and let it simmer gently for fifteen minutes. Turn into a buttered pie dish, and bake until firm--about half an hour.
A plain milk pudding of the sort that filled out a meatless dinner. Almost nothing here needs changing except the pasta timing, which will otherwise give you paste.
- Boil the macaroni far lessLong boiling of this kind is common in period recipes, and likely suited the coarser dried macaroni then sold. Modern dried macaroni needs 6-8 minutes in salted water, and even then stop it a shade short since it goes on cooking in the milk and again in the oven.
- Quantities6 ounces of dry macaroni is roughly 1 1/2 cups, and it will roughly double in volume once cooked. The pint of milk is 2 cups if the book is American, 20 fluid ounces if British; either works, the larger giving a looser, creamier set.
- Oven"Bake until firm" gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F for about 30 minutes, until the surface is set and lightly browned, is a reasonable reading. Too hot an oven risks the milk separating before the centre firms.
- Salt is assumed, not statedSalt the boiling water, and add a pinch to the milk as well. Without it the pudding tastes of nothing but nutmeg.
- Sweet or savouryThe recipe leaves this open. As written it is savoury and takes well to grated cheese and a little mustard; two tablespoons of sugar and a strip of lemon peel steeped in the milk turns it into the nursery version.
- The simmer mattersThe fifteen minutes in milk is what thickens the dish, as starch leaches from the pasta. Keep it barely bubbling and stir now and then, or the bottom will scorch and flavour the whole pudding.
- YieldEnough for four as a side or a light supper, in a dish of about 1 1/2 quarts. It sets firmer as it cools.
Macaroni arrived in British and American kitchens well before tomato sauce did, and for most of the nineteenth century it was treated as a starch in the same family as rice, sago and tapioca: boiled soft, bound with milk, scented with nutmeg and baked. Nutmeg was a common seasoning for milk puddings, and by the turn of the century it seems to have been affordable enough to count as a kitchen staple rather than a luxury. Books of meatless cookery multiplied in this era for three overlapping audiences: Lenten and fast-day cooks, the vegetarian societies that had grown steadily since the 1840s, and households simply economising, since a pudding like this fed several people on a few pence of macaroni and milk.