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Baked Macaroni or Spaghetti with Cheese
2 cups macaroni or spaghetti broken into short lengths 1/4 pound grated cheese 2 tablespoons butter 1 1/2 cups milk Salt and pepper Boil and drain the macaroni or spaghetti. Arrange a layer in the bottom of a pudding-dish. Over it sprinkle some of the cheese and scatter over this bits of butter or other fat. Add a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Fill the dish in this order, having macaroni on top, well oiled with butter, but without cheese. Add milk enough to just cover well and bake until a golden brown hue, one-half hour usually being sufficient. Serve in the dish in which it was baked.
A layered, milk-bound macaroni and cheese rather than the roux-thickened kind, and it works well if you keep the pasta firm and get the oven temperature right. The original gives no oven setting, which is the main gap to fill.
- Oven temperatureSet the oven to 375F. Half an hour at that heat will set the milk and colour the top; below 350F the dish takes considerably longer and the surface stays pale.
- Undercook the pastaBoil the macaroni about two minutes short of done. It absorbs milk in the oven, and pasta boiled soft first will be mushy after thirty minutes of baking.
- QuantitiesTwo cups of dry macaroni is roughly 8 oz; a quarter pound of grated cheese is about a cup, loosely packed. Serves four as a main dish, six as a side.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in American recipes of this period usually meant a firm, dry store cheese; a sharp cheddar is the closest match. Softer or very young cheeses tend to release fat and go greasy in a bare-milk custard with no flour to hold it.
- Pudding-dishA pudding-dish here is simply a deep ovenproof bowl or casserole, 1.5 to 2 quarts. Butter it well, since the recipe expects you to serve straight from it.
- Milk levelAdd milk until it just reaches the top layer of macaroni rather than flooding it. Too much and the dish stays soupy at the half-hour mark; whole milk sets better than skim.
- The plain top layerThe recipe deliberately leaves cheese off the top and butters it instead; the likely reason is that exposed cheese can scorch over half an hour. If you want a cheese crust, scatter it on for the last ten minutes only.
- SeasoningSalt the boiling water as well as the layers. Unsalted pasta in an unthickened milk bath tastes flat no matter how much you sprinkle between the layers.
New Delineator Recipes came out of the Butterick publishing house, which ran The Delineator magazine. Baked macaroni and cheese had been in American cookbooks since at least the early nineteenth century; its route into American kitchens is usually traced through English cookery to Italian pasta dishes, though that account is more tradition than documented history. What distinguishes this version is its simplicity: no white sauce, no eggs, no crumb topping, just layers moistened with plain milk that thickens on the pasta's own starch. That approach avoided the extra pan and extra step of a flour-and-butter sauce, and stretched a quarter pound of cheese across a family table.