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Macaroni Scallops No. 1
2 ounces pipe macaroni 4 ounces Parmesan cheese 2 ounces butter 2 tablespoons tomato sauce Pepper and salt to taste 6 scallop shells Cook the macaroni in half a pint of milk and water for half an hour. Drain, and cut up into small pieces, and add one ounce of the butter, with the pepper and salt and all the cheese. Mix it well; grease the shells, and put a little of the tomato sauce in each, and then fill up with the macaroni; sprinkle with bread crumbs and pieces of butter, and put them in the oven to brown for twenty minutes.
The "scallops" here are the shells, not the shellfish — this is a meatless macaroni gratin baked in six scallop shells. A few of the proportions and timings need adjusting for modern pasta and ovens.
- Scallop shellsDeep scallop shells were standard baking dishes in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens, sold by the dozen and used for anything served in individual portions. Small ramekins or shallow gratin dishes of about 1/2 cup capacity work identically.
- Pipe macaroniLong hollow macaroni sold in straight lengths, which is why the recipe tells you to cut it up after cooking. Any short tubular pasta — penne, ziti, elbows — gives the same result without the cutting.
- Cook it far lessHalf an hour suits the thick-walled macaroni of the period, cooked in a small amount of liquid. Modern dried pasta needs 8 to 10 minutes, and since it goes into the oven for another 20, pull it a minute short of al dente.
- Milk and waterHalf a pint here is most likely an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups; a US half-pint would be 8 fl oz, or 1 cup. Either way it is little liquid for boiling pasta freely -- use a generous pan of half milk, half water and drain well.
- The cheese ratioFour ounces of Parmesan to two ounces of dry macaroni is aggressive by modern taste -- the pasta roughly doubles in weight when cooked, but this is still a cheese dish with pasta in it. Halving the Parmesan gives a more familiar balance.
- BreadcrumbsThey appear in the method but not the ingredient list, as often happens in books of this kind. Allow about 2 tablespoons of dry crumbs for six shells.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as is usual in books of this date. Twenty minutes to brown a shallow filling implies a fairly hot oven; around 400F is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- YieldSix shells: a starter for six, or a light supper for three with a salad.
"Scallop" in nineteenth-century cookery usually meant the vessel and the method rather than the mollusc -- food minced, sauced, crumbed and browned in a shell was said to be scalloped, which is why a recipe called Macaroni Scallops can contain no shellfish. Meatless cookery of the period leaned heavily on cheese and pasta: Parmesan supplied savour and saltiness, and macaroni supplied bulk cheaply. Vegetarian cookery writing in Britain grew from the later nineteenth century onward, and its authors often shaped meatless dishes to resemble the dishes they replaced -- hence the individual shells, the browned crumb top, and a name borrowed from the fish course.