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Macaroni Savory
4 ounces macaroni 4 ounces Parmesan cheese 1/2 pint of milk 1/2 pound onions 1/2 pound tomatoes 2 ounces butter 3 ounces bread crumbs Pepper and salt Break the macaroni into two-inch lengths, and throw it into plenty of fast-boiling water, and let it boil quickly, stirring occasionally, for half an hour, and then drain the water from it. Now add the milk with pepper and salt, and let it boil up quickly, and then simmer for another half hour, when the macaroni should be quite tender. Stir frequently to prevent it sticking to the pan.
The onions in the meantime should have been peeled, sliced and boiled until tender in plenty of water. They must then be drained and slightly chopped. The tomatoes also must be thrown into boiling water for a few seconds, and when removed the skins will come off quite easily; they must now be sliced. Butter a good-sized French baking dish, and scatter in some bread crumbs; shake out all that do not stick to the butter. Place a layer of macaroni at the bottom of the dish, and scatter over it a third part of the Parmesan. Over that place the chopped onions and then the sliced tomatoes, and then the remainder of the macaroni. Cover this with half the remaining Parmesan, and over that scatter the rest of the bread crumbs. Now scatter the last of the Parmesan, and over that the butter, broken up into small pieces, and place over top. Bake for about twenty minutes in a hot oven; it should be a rich brown all over. This is an excellent dish, and well repays the cook's trouble, if attention is paid to all the details. If Genoa macaroni is used it requires a longer time to prepare than Naples. Twenty minutes in the water is long enough for Naples. Macaroni should always be served hot as it becomes pastry when cold.
A layered macaroni-and-cheese bake with onion and tomato between the layers. Almost everything transfers directly except the pasta timings, which belong to a much sturdier product than anything sold today.
- The hinge: cut the pasta cooking drasticallyHalf an hour of hard boiling followed by half an hour simmering in milk will reduce modern dried macaroni to paste. Boil it 6 to 7 minutes, stopping while it is still firm, then let it finish in the milk for 8 to 10 minutes until tender and the milk has mostly been absorbed.
- Genoa vs. Naples macaroniThe note at the end is the tell: these were regional macaronis that evidently differed in thickness or density, and the author expects the cook to judge. Ordinary supermarket elbows or short-cut tubes need neither the 30 minutes nor the 20.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup if the book is following American measure, 10 fluid ounces if British. Either works; start with a cup and add more if the pan goes dry before the macaroni is tender.
- A hot ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 425 to 450F. Twenty minutes at that heat is enough to brown the crumbs and cheese, which is mostly what the bake is for — the macaroni and onions are already cooked, though the sliced tomatoes go in raw.
- Four ounces of ParmesanRoughly a cup and a half finely grated. Real Parmigiano-Reggiano or a domestic grana; the shelf-stable powdered kind will not brown properly under the crumbs.
- Boiled onionsHalf a pound is two medium onions. Boiling them in plenty of water leaves them sweet and mild rather than caramelized, which is what the dish is built around — draining them well matters, or the layers turn watery.
- "A good-sized French baking dish"Probably a shallow gratin dish of earthenware or porcelain; something in the region of 8 by 10 inches will do. Depth is the enemy here; you want surface area for the crust.
- The layering, straightened outThe final instructions are garbled in the original. In practice: crumbed dish, macaroni, a third of the cheese, onions, tomatoes, remaining macaroni, a third of the cheese, the crumbs, the last third of the cheese, then the butter dotted over.
- YieldFour ounces of dry macaroni is not much: two as a main course, four as a side. It is at its best straight from the oven, as the closing line insists.
The distinction between Genoa and Naples macaroni reflects a period when dried pasta was still identified by its place of manufacture as well as by shape, and when cooking times genuinely varied from one supplier to the next; Naples was a major export centre for dried semolina pasta, and Italian macaroni was available in British and American groceries. The instruction that macaroni "becomes pastry when cold" is an honest observation of what is now called starch retrogradation, described in those terms only later.