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Macaroni and Cheese with Tomato Sauce
1 cup macaroni 1 tablespoon finely cut bacon 1 tablespoon finely cut onion 1 cup tomato sauce 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1/2 cup grated cheese 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Put macaroni in boiling salted water and cook until soft. Drain and rinse with cold water. Put bacon into frying pan; add onion and fry until onion and bacon are a light brown. Mix macaroni, tomato sauce. Onion and bacon, salt, pepper, paprika and one-half grated cheese together. Brush dish with bacon drippings and put in mixture; sprinkle top with remainder of cheese. Bake in moderate oven until brown. If hot oven is not available, mix ingredients and put into top of double boiler; heat thoroughly and serve with chopped parsley.
A straightforward baked macaroni that departs from the familiar milk-and-cheese version by using tomato sauce as the binder. A few of its terms and quantities need translating.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. Since everything goes in already cooked and hot, 20 to 25 minutes is enough to brown the cheese; a few minutes under the broiler finishes it faster.
- "Tomato sauce" means a made sauceIn books of this period tomato sauce is usually a butter-flour roux thinned with strained stewed tomatoes and seasoned, roughly the consistency of thin gravy, though plainer versions without flour also appear. Jarred pasta sauce is sweeter and much thicker, and will make the dish pasty; a plain tomato puree loosened with a little stock is closer.
- Paprika appears only in the methodIt is listed nowhere in the ingredients. About 1/4 teaspoon is in keeping with the era's habit of dusting paprika over anything pale.
- Cook the macaroni short"Until soft" was written for the long-cooked pasta of the day. Boil 2 minutes under the package time, since it will absorb sauce and bake further; otherwise the finished dish collapses into mush.
- The cold rinse is deliberateRinsing stops the cooking and washes off surface starch so the tomato sauce coats rather than glues. It is the right move here even though you would not do it for a sauced pasta served straight from the pot.
- Cheese"Grated cheese" in American recipes of this period usually meant a firm plain store cheddar. Half a cup grated is about 2 ounces. Pre-shredded cheese with anti-caking starch browns less well.
- BaconA tablespoon of finely cut bacon is at most one thin rasher, chopped. Render it slowly enough to leave a little fat for brushing the dish.
- Yield and the parsleyOne cup of dry macaroni makes about three modest side servings, or two light main servings. The parsley is only directed in the double-boiler version; in the baked dish it appears in the ingredients but never in the method, so treat it as a finishing garnish added after cooking rather than stirred through.
- The double boiler optionThis is a genuine alternative for a household without a working oven, and it produces a soft, loose dish with no crust. Stir it as little as possible once hot.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of the American promotional cookbooks distributed cheaply or free to put a branded tin in every kitchen, and like others of the genre it set plain family cookery alongside its baking chapters. That this macaroni sits under "Croquettes" says something about how loosely such books were organised: the recipe has nothing to do with croquettes, but a baked, bound, molded mixture was filed in the neighbourhood of other bound, molded mixtures. Macaroni was well established in American cooking before this book, reaching it both through English cookery, where it was baked with cream and cheese, and through Italian immigration, which brought the tomato with it; recipes of the 1910s and 1920s often show the two traditions a few entries apart. The instruction for cooks without a hot oven is a period detail worth noticing: a household cooking on a stovetop or in a summer kitchen might not think it worth firing the range for a single dish.