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Macroni Turnovers
2 ounces macaroni 1 tablespoon of butter 1 gill of milk 1 tablespoon grated cheese 1 saltspoon mustard Salt, pepper, cayenne Break the macaroni into very small pieces and cook in boiling salted water until tender. Strain, add the butter, milk, cheese and seasoning. Mix well. Make a short pie crust, roll it out thin and cut into squares. Put a spoonful of the mixture in the center of each square, fold over the edges and bake a golden brown. The mixture in the tart should be creamy. If too much of the milk is absorbed by the macaroni increase the quantity. As the cheese becomes thoroughly melted in cooking more moisture is added.
A small-batch macaroni-and-cheese pasty from the era when "meatless cookery" meant wartime economy rather than vegetarian principle. The filling is deliberately loose, and that is the whole point.
- A gill4 fluid ounces (half a US cup) by the American reckoning; an imperial gill is 5 fluid ounces, so the exact volume depends on where the book was written. Either way the recipe expects you to add more if the pasta drinks it, so treat it as a starting point rather than a measurement.
- SaltspoonAbout a quarter teaspoon. A saltspoon was a real object on Victorian and Edwardian tables, and is usually reckoned at about a quarter the size of a teaspoon.
- MustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. A quarter teaspoon of English mustard powder in this quantity of filling is assertive but correct with cheese.
- Keep the filling wetThe macaroni will continue absorbing liquid in the oven, and undersauced filling bakes into a dry plug. Aim for something noticeably looser than you would serve as macaroni cheese — it should slump off the spoon.
- Break it smallTwo-inch tubes will pierce thin pastry from the inside. Snap the macaroni to roughly quarter-inch lengths before boiling, or use a small short shape.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Short crust of this kind wants 400–425F; 15 to 20 minutes gets you the golden brown asked for on turnovers this size.
- Pastry quantityNo quantity of pastry is given. Two ounces of dry macaroni should make roughly six to eight three-inch turnovers, so about 8 ounces of short crust -- one standard single-crust batch.
- SealingDamp the edges and press firmly with a fork, and leave a small vent or two. A creamy filling steams hard and will find any weak seam.
- YieldRoughly six to eight turnovers, enough for two or three as a light main course with a salad.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in Britain and the United States around the First World War, when meat was expensive or patriotically forgone — rationing came late in Britain and the American effort relied largely on voluntary meatless days — and the concern was generally economy rather than ethics, with cheese the usual stand-in as a cheaper source of protein. The turnover itself belongs to a much older tradition of enclosing a filling in pastry so it can be eaten in the hand, carried to work, or served without a plate. Macaroni had been familiar in English-speaking kitchens since the eighteenth century, generally baked with cheese and cream in the manner Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton both recorded; here it is simply shifted from the gratin dish into pie crust. The insistence that the filling stay creamy is the mark of a writer who has eaten a dry one.