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Baked Macaroni with Cheese
1 cup macaroni 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup milk 1/2 cup grated cheese 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1/8 teaspoon paprika Boil macaroni in salted water; drain and rinse with cold water. Put into buttered dish and cover with sauce. Bake 20 minutes in hot oven. SAUCE Put butter into saucepan; add flour, mix well and add cold milk slowly, stirring until smooth; add cheese, salt, pepper and paprika. Boil 2 minutes, or until cheese is melted.
A plain white-sauce macaroni cheese from a baking-powder company pamphlet, written for cooks who needed no persuading. Two things need translating: the oven and the cheese.
- "Hot oven"By the conventions of the period, somewhere in the range of 400-450F; 425F is a fair working figure. Twenty minutes at that heat is enough to set the sauce and brown the surface; the macaroni is already cooked, so the bake is only for browning and melding.
- 1 cup macaroniThat is dry measure, roughly 4 oz of elbows, which cooks up to about 2 cups. The whole dish fits a 1-quart baking dish and serves two as a main or three or four alongside something else.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in an American book of this date would most often have meant a firm store cheese, that is, a plain aged cheddar. Buy a block and grate it; pre-shredded cheese is coated with starch or cellulose and will thicken the sauce further and turn it grainy.
- Add the cheese off the heatThe instruction to boil the sauce two minutes after the cheese goes in is the one thing worth ignoring. Boiling cheese sauce breaks the emulsion and leaves oily strings. Boil the flour-and-milk base for two minutes to cook out the raw starch, then pull the pan off the burner and stir the cheese in until it melts.
- A thin sauce, deliberatelyA thin sauce -- One tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk is a thin bechamel by modern habit. Left loose it runs down through the macaroni in the oven; thickened to a coating consistency it will bake dry.
- The cold rinseRinsing washes off surface starch and stops the cooking, which keeps the macaroni from turning soft in the oven. Drain it well afterward, since water clinging to the pasta will thin the sauce further.
- Undercook the pastaBoil it a minute or two short of tender. It absorbs milk during the bake and will otherwise come out slack.
- If you want a crustThe recipe gives no topping, so the surface browns only where sauce meets air. A handful of buttered breadcrumbs or a little extra grated cheese over the top before it goes in is entirely in keeping with the period.
The New Royal Cook Book was one of the promotional cookbooks issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, given away or sold for pennies to put the brand in American kitchens; some of the recipes, like this one, carry no leavening at all. Cooked macaroni bound in a thick cheese sauce, chilled, shaped, crumbed and fried was a standard chafing-dish and luncheon item of the era, and the baked version sits naturally beside it as the same mixture left in the dish. Dry macaroni had by this point been machine-made and boxed in the United States for decades, cheap and shelf-stable, which is what moved macaroni and cheese out of the ambitious household and into the everyday supper it has been ever since. Paprika, listed here in an eighth of a teaspoon, was fashionable in American cooking of the 1910s and 1920s, often said to have been valued largely for its color on a pale surface.