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Macaroni and Pine-apple
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-1 pint of any clear jelly, 1/21 tin of preserved pineapple, 3 oz. of loaf sugar, 6 oz. of macaroni, milk, cochineal. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Boil the macaroni in milk till tender. sweetening it with sugar. Melt the jelly and coat a wetted border mould with it; and in this arrange the pine drained from the syrup and cut in dice. Colour what is left of the jelly with the cochineal and fill up the mould with it; and when the jelly is set, turn it out and fill in the centre with the macaroni, with a good custard poured over.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A moulded jelly ring filled with sweet milk-cooked macaroni and custard — a Victorian dessert built on two things modern cooks rarely do: set jelly in a border mould, and simmer pasta in sweetened milk. The hinge is the layering: each addition of jelly must be fully set before the next goes in, or the diced pineapple floats and the colours bleed.
- The quantity typo"1/21 tin" is a printing error for half a tin. Tin sizes vary, then and now, so judge by eye: enough drained, diced pineapple to line a 1-pint border mould.
- "Clear jelly"A sweet gelatine jelly, not savoury aspic — calf's-foot or packet jelly, flavoured with lemon or wine. One pint of made-up jelly from powdered gelatine or a supermarket jelly tablet does the job; use it slightly firmer than a spoonable set so it holds when unmoulded.
- CochinealA red colouring made from crushed scale insects, used a few drops at a time. It is still sold as carmine or E120; any red food colouring gives the same two-tone effect the recipe is after. Only the jelly left over after the mould is coated is coloured.
- Loaf sugarSugar broken from a hard cone or loaf. Ordinary granulated sugar, 3 oz, is the equivalent — it dissolves into the milk as the macaroni cooks.
- Macaroni in milkLong macaroni tubes, broken into short lengths, simmered gently in sweetened milk until soft. Allow 15-20 minutes over low heat with frequent stirring; the starch thickens the milk and it scorches easily. Cook it further than you would for a savoury dish — this wants tenderness, not bite.
- The custard"A good custard" means a stirred egg custard: roughly 3 egg yolks to half a pint of milk, cooked to about 175F until it coats a spoon. Cool it before pouring over the macaroni or it will soften the jelly ring.
- Border mould and unmouldingA ring mould, wetted so the jelly releases. Chill each jelly layer until firm — 30-40 minutes in the refrigerator — before adding the next. To turn out, dip the mould briefly in hot water and invert onto a wetted plate so the ring can be nudged into position.
- Yield and servingServes six as written, and needs to be assembled a few hours ahead and kept cold. Fill the centre only just before serving, since the cooled custard and the jelly ring do not sit together for long.
- The cost noteTwo shillings was the estimated cost of the whole dish at the time of writing, not a modern guide to anything.
Sweet macaroni puddings run right through nineteenth-century British cookery — macaroni boiled in milk with sugar was a standard nursery and invalid dish long before it became a dinner-table sweet, and Beeton's books carry several versions. The tinned pineapple suggests a late date: cheap canned pineapple from Singapore and the Straits Settlements reached British grocers in growing quantity from the late nineteenth century (Hawaiian canning on any scale came later), and a fruit that had been an aristocratic hothouse trophy became something a middle-class household could buy in a tin. The moulded border, coloured in two shades and turned out onto a dish, belongs to the same impulse — a dessert judged as much by how it looked on the table as by how it tasted, in an era when the ring mould and a bottle of cochineal did the work a piping bag does now.