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Macaroni Scallops No. 2
4 ounces pipe macaroni 2 tablespoons cream 1 small Spanish onion 4 ounces cooked chestnuts A little butter 2 ounces grated cheese Pepper and salt to taste Throw the macaroni into boiling water for half an hour; then drain and chop up very fine with the onion, which has been scalded first. Cook the chestnuts, and pass through a sieve. Mix all together with the cream; butter some scallop shells, and fill them with the mixture. Sprinkle over them a layer of grated cheese, and then one of bread crumbs on top. Cut up the butter in small pieces, and put them on the bread crumbs; brown in the oven for about a quarter of an hour.
A simple gratin of pasta, chestnut and cheese baked in shells. Two things in the original need correcting before you start: the macaroni's cooking time, and the fact that breadcrumbs appear in the method but never in the ingredient list.
- Half an hour is far too longHalf an hour is longer than modern pasta wants -- macaroni of the period was coarser and drier and was often boiled this long, but today's dried tube pasta will be soft to mushy after thirty minutes, and it is then chopped fine and baked again. Cook it to just under al dente, around 7-9 minutes for most dried tube pasta, since it gets a further quarter-hour in the oven.
- Pipe macaroniLarge straight hollow tubes, sold at the time in long lengths to be snapped; the gauge varied. Any large tubular dried pasta works; the shape matters little as it is chopped fine anyway.
- Missing breadcrumbsThe method calls for a layer of crumbs over the cheese but the ingredient list omits them. Allow about 1/2 cup of dry white breadcrumbs for this quantity.
- Cooked chestnutsFour ounces means peeled chestnut meats, not weight in shell. Vacuum-packed or tinned whole chestnuts are the direct equivalent; simmer them until soft enough to press through a sieve, or pulse to a coarse paste. Unsweetened chestnut puree also works, but sweetened marron cream does not.
- Scalding the onionA small Spanish onion raw and chopped fine would dominate the dish. Dropping it into boiling water for a couple of minutes takes off the harshness, which is exactly what "scalded first" is doing. Drain it well or the mixture goes wet.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. To brown crumbs and butter in about fifteen minutes you want a hot oven, roughly 400-425F, with the shells on a baking sheet on an upper rack.
- Scallop shellsDeep natural shells or the tinned steel "coquille" dishes sold for the purpose. Small ramekins or a shallow gratin dish serve the same end; the shells are about presentation and portion size, not cooking.
- Seasoning and yieldChestnut and macaroni are both bland, so salt generously and use a sharp cheese for the topping. The quantities fill four shells and make a light course for two, or a starter for four.
"Scallops" here does not refer to the shellfish as an ingredient: the culinary sense derives from the scallop's shell used as a baking dish, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense of a savoury mixture baked and served in a scallop shell, the same usage that survives in the French coquille and in the verb "to scallop" a dish of potatoes. Books of meatless cookery, which proliferated in Britain and America around the turn of the twentieth century for Lenten tables and vegetarian households, leaned heavily on chestnuts. Starchy, dense and faintly sweet, chestnut was one of several substitutes for the body and richness of meat, alongside lentils, pulses, cheese and other nuts, appearing in cutlets, roasts and rissoles throughout such collections. Paired here with pasta, cheese and cream, it produces a dish whose protein contribution is modest by modern reckoning but whose texture and satiety were the real point.