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Macaroni with Tomatoes
Prepare macaroni as for baking. Put layer of tomatoes in pudding dish; cover with macaroni; season with salt, pepper and butter. Repeat this until the dish is full. Sprinkle cracker crumbs on the top with bits of butter. Bake slowly for an hour.
A cross-referenced recipe: it assumes you have already read the entry for baked macaroni, and it assumes a fireless cooker rather than an oven. Both gaps are easy to close.
- "Prepare macaroni as for baking"Boil the macaroni in well-salted water until just short of tender, then drain. It will finish in the dish, and macaroni that starts fully cooked turns to paste over an hour of slow baking.
- Bake slowlyThe book gives no temperature; a slow oven in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 275-325F. An hour at that heat suits a dish whose macaroni is deliberately underdone and whose tomatoes need to cook down. If you want colour on the crumbs, raise the heat for the last few minutes.
- TomatoesThe recipe does not say fresh or canned, and either was plausible by this date. If using canned, drain them well or the dish floods; a large can, drained and roughly broken up, suits a two-quart pudding dish.
- Cracker crumbsCrushed soda crackers, not sweet crackers and not the fine dry breadcrumbs sold today. Common saltines work; crush them coarsely so the top stays crisp.
- Seasoning between layersNothing is seasoned in advance here, so the salt, pepper and butter that go on each layer carry the whole dish. Be more generous than feels right, particularly with salt.
The dish belongs to the broad family of baked macaroni casseroles that spread through American cookbooks as cheap boxed pasta and canned tomatoes became reliably available in the late nineteenth century; the tomato version, without cheese, was the plainer and more economical treatment.