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Baked Macaroni with Cheese
1 cup broken macaroni 1 pint cream sauce 2 quarts boiling salted water 1 cup grated cheese 1 cup buttered bread crumbs Cook the macaroni in the water for twenty or thirty minutes; drain and blanch with cold water. Put the macaroni in a pudding dish in layers, covering each with cream sauce and grated cheese and making the top layer of bread crumbs. Bake in the oven until the crumbs are brown. 10 butter crackers or Boston
A plain baked macaroni built on white sauce rather than a custard or a straight cheese melt. Almost everything works as written except the pasta timing, which belongs to an era of thicker, unenriched macaroni.
- Cut the boiling time hardTwenty to thirty minutes will reduce modern dried elbows or broken tubes to mush, especially since they go on to bake. Boil 6 to 8 minutes, a shade under the package direction, so the macaroni still has bite when it goes into the dish.
- Blanching with cold waterThis means rinsing the drained macaroni under cold water to stop the cooking and wash off surface starch so the pieces stay separate. It is worth doing here because the sauce is layered rather than stirred through.
- Cream sauceA pint is 2 cups of medium white sauce: 4 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little grated nutmeg or mustard if you like. The sauce is listed as an ingredient rather than explained, so a base recipe was presumably given elsewhere.
- The cheese"Grated cheese", unspecified, is most safely read as a firm aged cheddar or similar hard cheese. A cup grated is roughly 3 to 4 ounces. Avoid pre-shredded cheese, which carries anti-caking starch and grains in the sauce.
- Buttered bread crumbsOne cup of soft fresh crumbs tossed with about 2 tablespoons melted butter until they look damp, not soaked. Dry packaged crumbs brown too fast and taste of nothing.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the only guide is "until the crumbs are brown". Bake at 375F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the crumbs are an even brown.
- The stray line at the end"10 butter crackers or Boston" is a fragment, cut off mid-phrase. It most likely belongs to a cracker-crumb alternative to the buttered bread crumbs, though it may simply be the first ingredient line of the following recipe. Ten crackers rolled fine come to roughly a cup.
- YieldA small dish: one cup of dry macaroni makes about two cups cooked, enough for two or three as a main course or four as a side.
The construction here, layered with a flour-thickened white sauce rather than bound with eggs, is the cooking-school approach: master the cream sauce once and it carries scalloped vegetables, creamed fish and this dish alike. Dried macaroni was a cheap, shelf-stable American pantry staple by the later nineteenth century, and combined with milk and cheese it gave a dish domestic-science writers could defend on nutritional grounds -- such dishes were often grouped with egg and bean dishes as economical stand-ins for meat.