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Boiled Macaroni
Break the macaroni into small pieces; boil for half an hour; drain and blanch in cold water. Reheat in tomato or cream sauce and serve. Grated cheese may be sprinkled over the dish if desired. The recipe for Baked Macaroni will be found in the chapter on "Meat Substitutes." 4 cucumbers
A plain method for macaroni to be dressed in sauce, written for pasta that behaved differently from what is on shelves now. One timing needs to be thrown out entirely.
- Half an hour is far too longModern dried macaroni is thin-walled and extruded to cook in 8-11 minutes, and it will collapse into paste well before thirty. Boil to just short of tender, since it finishes in the sauce.
- Why the original says thirty minutesMacaroni of this period was frequently imported, thicker-walled and slow-dried, and often sold loose rather than boxed, all of which would have called for a longer boil than modern extruded pasta. Thirty minutes is still generous even by those standards.
- "Blanch in cold water"Here blanch means rinse under cold water to stop the cooking, not the modern sense of a brief scald. Only do this if the pasta is going into sauce later; if you are serving straight away, drain and dress at once so the sauce clings.
- Salt the waterThe recipe omits it. Pasta boiled in unsalted water cannot be corrected with salt at the table.
- Cream sauceRead this as a white sauce: a standard period ratio is roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or cream, cooked until it coats a spoon. Season it more assertively than seems necessary, since the pasta is bland.
- Quantity and yieldNo amount is given. Eight ounces of dried macaroni with about a cup and a half of sauce serves four as a side dish, or two or three as a main with cheese.
- The stray line'4 cucumbers' at the end is a stray fragment of adjacent text and has nothing to do with the macaroni. Ignore it.
Macaroni entered American home cookery well before this book appeared. The cross-reference here to "Meat Substitutes" is the telling detail: pasta with cheese was catalogued alongside beans, nuts and eggs as a way to build a dinner without meat, an economy that Progressive-era domestic science promoted and that wartime food conservation encouraged.