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Macaroni with Green Peas
1/2 cup cream 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/3 cup macaroni broken into one-inch lengths 1 cup green peas Cook the macaroni in boiling salted water. Drain, and pour over it a dash of cold water. Drain again and add to it the cream, salt and green peas, freshly cooked or canned, from which the liquid has been drained. Heat, and cook for five to ten minutes over the flame.
A very small, very plain dish that lives or dies on how you treat the cream. Everything else is a matter of scaling it up.
- YieldAs written this serves one generously or two as a side. The proportions double and triple cleanly; keep the ratio of roughly three times as much pea as dry macaroni by volume.
- The cream'Cream' in books of this period is not a fixed quantity: unqualified 'cream' could mean anything from a light cream of roughly 18 percent fat up to a much richer 'thick cream.' Half-and-half or light cream will thin out and may separate over direct heat, so heavy cream is the safer choice if you want the sauce to cling.
- Keep it below a boilThis is the hinge. The five to ten minutes "over the flame" is meant to reduce the cream slightly and glaze the pasta, not to boil it. Hold it at a bare simmer and stir; a hard boil in a shallow pan will break the cream and leave a greasy film.
- Cooking the macaroniFollow the package timing, generally 8 to 10 minutes for cut macaroni, and stop a minute short since it finishes in the cream. The dash of cold water chiefly halts the cooking and rinses off surface starch, so drain thoroughly afterward or the sauce will be watery.
- The peasCanned peas are already fully cooked and only need warming through. Fresh or frozen peas should be cooked separately first, then drained and added, since simmering raw peas in cream for ten minutes gives you neither cooked peas nor good sauce.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon is for the sauce, on top of the salted pasta water. Canned peas are often salted already, so taste before adding all of it.
- ServingIt sets up quickly as it cools and reheats poorly. Serve straight from the pan; a grating of nutmeg or black pepper is period-appropriate and welcome.
Meatless cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s had two audiences: households observing Lent or Friday abstinence, and households working through wartime and post-war meat conservation campaigns. Where the meat protein is gone, the calories and satisfaction are meant to come from dairy fat and starch, which is why a third of a cup of macaroni arrives with half a cup of cream. Macaroni was by then thoroughly domesticated in American kitchens, and was often sold dry in long tubes to be snapped into lengths at home, which is why the recipe specifies breaking it into inch pieces. Cream-and-pea combinations were a standing convention of the period, appearing with everything from new potatoes to salmon.