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Mushrooms and Macaroni
(Italian style.) Put one tablespoonful of butter and one teaspoonful of lemon juice into the blazer; add a dozen peeled mushrooms, broken into pieces and blanched, and cook slowly, covered, five or six minutes. Then add one cup and one-fourth of milk, and, when scalded, stir in two tablespoonfuls, each, of butter and flour, creamed together. When the sauce boils, add one-fourth a pound of macaroni, cooked and blanched in the usual manner; heat over hot water, and, just before serving, add one-fourth a cup of grated cheese.
A chafing-dish supper dish that is essentially macaroni in a quick mushroom béchamel, thickened at the last minute rather than from a roux at the start. The order of operations is unusual and worth following exactly.
- The blazer and the water panA chafing dish has two parts: the blazer, the shallow pan that sits over the flame, and a water pan beneath it. Cook in the blazer over direct heat, then set it over the hot water pan to hold. A wide skillet plus a bowl set over simmering water does the same work.
- The thickening is beurre manié, not a rouxTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour creamed together raw are stirred into scalded milk. Add it in small pinches and whisk, or it will sit in lumps; let it come to a full boil for a minute or two so the flour loses its raw taste.
- "Blanched" mushroomsHere it means a brief dip in boiling water; period cookery often blanched mushrooms, and keeping them pale is one likely reason. It is a step you can skip "e" sauteing them dry in the butter until the liquid cooks off gives far more flavour. Twelve mushrooms probably means twelve medium button caps, on the order of 6-8 oz.
- PeelingPeriod cookbooks routinely direct that mushrooms be peeled. Modern cultivated mushrooms need only a wipe.
- "Blanched in the usual manner" for macaroniThe period habit was to boil macaroni, then rinse it in cold water to stop the cooking and wash off surface starch. Undercook it slightly, since it finishes in the sauce.
- The cheese goes in off the heatThe cheese goes in last -- Grated cheese added just before serving, as directed, is the point; the pan is over the hot-water bath by then, not the flame, and held over direct heat the cheese will string and the sauce break. The recipe specifies only "grated cheese"; a quarter cup grated is roughly 1 oz.
- MeasuresOne and one-fourth cups of milk is 10 fl oz. A quarter pound of macaroni is 4 oz dry, about a cup of elbows.
- YieldTwo generous portions as a supper dish, or four small ones as a course. Chafing-dish quantities tend to suit late-evening eating rather than a main meal.
Chafing-dish cookery was a fashion of the 1890s and 1900s in American cities, tied to late suppers after the theatre, bachelor apartments, and college rooms where there was no stove. The appeal was that a spirit lamp and two nested pans could produce something hot and slightly worldly in front of guests, which is why the genre leans so heavily on oysters, eggs, cheese and pasta — things that cook in minutes. Labelling a cheese-and-macaroni dish "Italian style" reflects the period's shorthand: macaroni and grated cheese were understood as Italian at a time when large-scale Italian immigration was making both newly familiar in the United States, though the sauce here is a French béchamel and the seasoning stops at lemon juice. Mushrooms belonged to the same register of mild luxury; commercial cultivation was expanding in the eastern states, and cookbooks of the decade treat them as a garnish worth naming in a title.