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Macaroni with Cheese
4 ounces of macaroni 4 ounces grated cheese 1/2 pint milk 1 ounce butter Pepper, salt Break the macaroni into two-inch lengths, and throw it into plenty of fast boiling water, and let it boil quickly for half an hour. Now drain it, and add the milk to it, and a little pepper, bring it to the boiling point quickly, and then let it simmer gently for another half hour. The macaroni should be perfectly tender, but unbroken, and the cheese and butter may now be added, stirring the contents of the saucepan constantly--one way--until the whole of the cheese is melted and thoroughly mixed with the macaroni. Turn it out on a dish, and serve hot as possible. Another way of serving the macaroni makes a prettier dish: Instead of adding the cheese and butter to the macaroni in the saucepan, a layer of the macaroni may be put on the bottom of a well-buttered French baking dish, and part of the cheese scattered over it; then the rest of the macaroni must be put over the cheese, and the remainder of the cheese used as before. The top should be covered with fine bread crumbs, and the butter taken and broken up in bits, and placed over the top. This dish should now be placed in a hot oven, and quickly browned.
It is necessary to stir the macaroni occasionally when boiling quickly in the water, and after the milk has been added, it must be stirred frequently, or it will stick to the pan and spoil.
A plain cheese-and-milk macaroni from the days when dried pasta was hard, thick and slow to soften. The timings are the part that needs rewriting; everything else stands.
- The hinge: the cooking timesAn hour of total cooking suited the coarse, thick-walled macaroni of the period. Modern extruded dried macaroni is done in 8 to 10 minutes of boiling; take it out a shade short of tender, then give it 5 to 8 minutes in the milk to finish and thicken. Follow the original clock and you will get paste.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup in American measure, 10 fl oz if the book is being read from an English kitchen. Either amount works, but with the shortened simmer you may want the smaller quantity, since less liquid will boil away.
- SaltSalt appears in the ingredient list and never again in the method. Salt the boiling water generously; the cheese will bring the rest.
- "Grated cheese"The recipe does not say which cheese; a firm, dry, sharp cheese of the Cheddar, Cheshire or Lancashire type is the likely intention. Four ounces to four ounces of dry macaroni is a high proportion of cheese. Grate it yourself, as pre-shredded cheese is dusted with starch and melts grainy.
- Stirring "one way"A kitchen superstition of long standing, with no effect on the dish. What does matter is the instruction behind it: stir often once the milk goes in, or the starch will catch and scorch on the pan bottom.
- A French baking dishA shallow, straight-sided earthenware or porcelain gratin dish. Any wide, low ovenproof dish serves; the shallowness is what gives you a good ratio of browned crumb to interior.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'hot oven' is usually read today as somewhere around 425 to 450F. The dish is already hot when it goes in, so you are only browning the top -- 10 to 15 minutes, or a few minutes under a broiler.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. Four ounces of dry macaroni is modest: one to two as a main course, three or four as a side. Double it for a family and use a larger dish rather than a deeper one.
Macaroni dressed with cheese and butter was long established in English and American cookery by the nineteenth century, descended from the eighteenth-century fashion for Italian pasta among travelled gentry and repeated throughout the household manuals that followed. Meatless cookery of this kind was rarely vegetarian on principle -- such dishes were cooked for Lent and for thrift, and cheese and pulses were commonly promoted as a cheap route to a day's nourishment. The two-stage method, boiling the macaroni in water and then finishing it in milk, is worth noticing: it relies on starch released by the pasta itself to bind the dish rather than on a flour-thickened white sauce.