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Baked Macaroni
1/2 pound macaroni 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups cream sauce 1/2 cup bread crumbs Break the sticks into small pieces; add salt and boil for thirty minutes. Add cream sauce and bake for two and a half hours, using both radiators. Reheat and serve.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe, written for an insulated box heated by soapstone or iron discs rather than by a flame. Everything about the timing follows from that, and none of it transfers directly to a stove and oven.
- What "both radiators" meansA fireless cooker was an insulated chest holding one or two heavy stone or metal discs that were brought to a high heat on the range, then set under and over the food vessel. Using both means one disc below and one above, so heat reaches the dish from both sides. The two and a half hours most likely reflects how long the box holds usable heat rather than how long the macaroni itself needs.
- The thirty-minute boilMacaroni of the period was a thick, hard, slow-drying extruded paste sold in long sticks, and half an hour of boiling was normal. Modern dried macaroni is finished in 8 to 10 minutes, and here it should be pulled while still firm since it continues to soften in the sauce.
- If you use an oven insteadAssemble as directed and bake at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, until bubbling at the edges and browned on top. There is no benefit to the longer hold; the fireless timing exists because the appliance could not be adjusted.
- Cream sauceCream sauce here means a plain white sauce. A typical period version is about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour per cup of milk or thin cream, cooked together and simmered until it coats a spoon; check the book's own cream sauce entry if it has one. Season it well, since the macaroni carries only the half teaspoon of salt from its cooking water.
- The bread crumbsThey appear in the ingredient list and never again in the method. Scatter them over the surface before the dish goes in, ideally tossed with a little melted butter so they colour rather than dry out.
- CheeseNote that there is none. A cream-sauce macaroni without cheese was a standard mild supper dish at this date; add half a cup of grated cheese to the sauce if you want the version most readers now expect.
- "Reheat and serve"The recipe does not say why, but after hours in the cooker the dish would be hot without further browning, and the most likely sense is a brief return to the range or oven before serving. Skip this if you have baked it conventionally.
- YieldHalf a pound of macaroni with two cups of sauce serves two or three as a main dish, or about four as a side.
Fireless cookery was a serious enthusiasm in American households between roughly 1900 and the 1920s. The principle was simple insulation: food was brought to boiling on the range, then sealed into a packed box with preheated soapstone or cast-iron radiators, where retained heat finished the cooking over several hours without further fuel. It was promoted as economical, as a way to keep the kitchen cool in summer, and as a means of leaving dinner unattended, which mattered in houses without servants. Baked macaroni suited the method well because starch and a flour-thickened sauce tolerate long, gentle, declining heat without spoiling in texture. The dish itself is the plain American macaroni of the period, descended from the buttered and sauced macaroni that appears in English cookery books from the seventeenth century, becomes widespread in the eighteenth, and reaches America somewhat later; the heavily cheesed casserole most people picture today is a later emphasis.