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Macaroni with Cheese
Cook the macaroni as for baking. Place a layer of macaroni in a pudding dish; cover with a layer of cream sauce and a layer of grated cheese. Alternate until the dish is filled. Put layer of bread crumbs on top with bits of butter. Bake for two hours, using both radiators.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe, so the method depends on equipment almost nobody has now. The instructions themselves translate easily to an oven once you know what the "radiators" were doing.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated box holding one or two nests for cooking vessels. Heat came entirely from soapstone or cast-iron discs — the "radiators" — heated red-hot on the range, then set under and over the food so the sealed box coasted for hours. There is no thermostat and no browning.
- "Using both radiators"One disc below the dish and one above, for maximum stored heat. A single radiator gives noticeably less stored heat; two hold a slow-oven range longer, long enough to set the sauce and soften the pasta.
- Oven equivalentBaked in a conventional oven this needs 350F for 30 to 40 minutes, uncovered, not two hours. The long fireless time is a function of falling heat, not of anything the macaroni requires.
- "Cook the macaroni as for baking"Boil it short of done — a couple of minutes less than the package says. It will keep absorbing sauce during the bake, and macaroni cooked soft first turns to paste.
- Cream sauceA medium white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats the spoon, seasoned with salt and pepper. Period books often add a grating of nutmeg or a little dry mustard. Make it slightly thinner than you would for a stovetop mac, since the pasta will drink some of it.
- Cheese"Grated cheese" in a book of this date would most often have been a firm aged Cheddar or an American factory cheese of the same type. Grate it yourself; pre-shredded cheese is coated with starch and breaks less smoothly.
- The crumb topButtered crumbs will not color in a fireless cooker. If you use one, brown them separately in a skillet before scattering them on, or finish the assembled dish under a broiler.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A pudding dish of around 1½ quarts would take roughly 8 oz dry macaroni, 2 cups sauce and 6 to 8 oz cheese, serving four to six.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between about 1900 and the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period often carried a dedicated section for it. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range was expensive and miserably hot to run in summer, so heating two soapstone discs and shutting the food into an insulated box let a dish cook itself while the fire went out. Baked macaroni and cheese was a natural candidate, being a dish that only needs sustained gentle heat, and it was already a fixture of American cooking — by the late nineteenth century it appeared in nearly every general cookbook as an economical main dish. Reliable gas and electric ovens made the fireless cooker obsolete, though its logic survives in the slow cooker and in the modern habit of finishing grains off the heat.