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Casserole Hash
1/4 pound macaroni Butter Grated cheese Cold chopped meat Brown sauce or stock Boil the macaroni; drain and put it in a buttered casserole with a little butter and grated cheese. Push the macaroni to the sides of the dish; fill the center with the meat, well seasoned and moistened with brown sauce or meat stock. Place in the oven until hot throughout and serve.
A leftovers dish with almost no measurements beyond the macaroni, so treat the quarter pound of pasta as the anchor and scale everything else to it. It is filed under chafing-dish cookery but finished in the oven, which tells you it was meant for a hot supper rather than tableside theatre.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of dry macaroni is 4 oz, about 1 cup, and cooks up to roughly 2 cups. The recipe gives no other amounts; something like 8 to 10 oz of chopped cooked meat and 1/2 to 3/4 cup of sauce or stock will fill a 1-quart dish and serve two.
- "Casserole"In older usage the word generally means the vessel, not the genre. Any ovenproof dish of about a quart works; a small gratin dish gives the best ratio of crust to filling.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature, only "in the oven." Set 375F and give it 15 to 20 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edges. Everything is already cooked, so you are only heating through and browning.
- The macaroniMacaroni of the period often meant long tubes rather than elbows, which would make the wall the recipe describes easier to build. Long ziti or bucatini, cooked a minute past the package time so they are pliable, will hold the shape better than modern elbows.
- Brown sauce or stockBrown sauce here would be a flour-thickened espagnole-type gravy, and it holds the centre together better than the plain stock the recipe offers as an alternative. If you use stock and want a firmer filling, thicken it with a small roux, or use leftover gravy.
- Season the meat, not the dishCold cooked meat is bland and the recipe leans entirely on the meat being "well seasoned." Salt, pepper and a little mustard or Worcestershire mixed into the meat and sauce before it goes in is what keeps this from tasting like reheated scraps.
- CheeseAny firm grating cheese; a dry aged Cheddar, an American "factory" cheese, or Parmesan would all suit. Scatter a little more over the top before baking if you want colour, since a short spell at 375F will not brown much on its own.
Chafing-dish cookery had a long vogue in American households between roughly the 1890s and the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period devote whole sections to it: a spirit lamp under a metal pan let a hostess cook at the table without a servant, and it was a respectable way to feed people late at night after the theatre or a card party. Its repertoire leaned heavily on things already cooked -- creamed oysters, rarebits and hashes -- because a chafing dish gives gentle heat and little browning. This dish is assembled cold and then finished in an oven, which makes it a leftovers supper. Ringing a dish with macaroni and filling the middle recalls the older "timbale" or macaroni border, a garnished centrepiece that in professional kitchens was moulded, turned out and sauced at table.