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Macaroni
Break in pieces, drop in boiling water, or if desired, whole. Let drop from ends gently into the boiling water, with salt added. Let cook until tender, drain off hot water and pour over macaroni cold water to blanch. Serve with cream sauce.
A bare-bones method for boiling macaroni, written when dried pasta was still a novelty in many American kitchens and the cook needed telling that it should not be dropped in dry and forgotten.
- Water and saltUse a generous pot of water so the pieces move freely, and salt it well before the macaroni goes in — roughly a tablespoon of salt per four quarts. Salting the water seasons the pasta itself, which sauce alone does less well.
- Feeding long macaroni inThe instruction to \"let drop from ends gently\" applies to the long hollow macaroni sold in straight rods at the time. Set the ends in the boiling water and let them soften, then coil the rest in as it bends rather than snapping it.
- \"Until tender\""Until tender" -- Recipes of the period commonly specified twenty minutes or more, giving a result soft throughout. Modern dried macaroni wants 7 to 10 minutes; taste a piece and stop while there is still a little resistance at the centre.
- The cold-water rinseRinsing chills the pasta and washes off the surface starch, which is right if the macaroni is going into a salad or being held to bake later. If it is going straight into cream sauce, skip it — the sauce clings far better to hot, unrinsed pasta.
- Cream sauceThe recipe assumes the reader knows a basic white sauce: butter and flour cooked together in equal volume, then milk whisked in, about 2 tablespoons of each per cup of milk. Season with salt and pepper.
- QuantityNo amount is given. Half a pound of dried macaroni with about two cups of cream sauce serves four as a side dish, or three as a supper.
Boiled macaroni was a familiar economy dish in American cookbooks by the early twentieth century — filling, shelf-stable and meatless. The blanching step is a holdover from a period when pasta was routinely boiled soft and then held, drained, until the sauce and the family were ready.