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Titus Andronicus
Macaroni à la Italienne.
HAVE ready one-fourth a pound of macaroni, cooked until tender, but not broken, in boiling salted water, and then drained, and rinsed in cold water.
Make a sauce of two tablespoonfuls of butter, one tablespoonful of flour, one-fourth a teaspoonful, each, of salt and paprica, half a cup of wellseasoned stock and half a cup of well-reduced tomato pulp. Add the drained macaroni and stir occasionally, while it becomes thoroughly heated, then add one-fourth a cup of grated Parmesan cheese. Lift the macaroni with a fork and spoon so as to mix thoroughly with the cheese, and serve at once.
Strain the tomatoes through a sieve sufficiently fine to keep back the seeds, and cook the pulp, very slowly, until reduced to at least half its bulk. A more hearty dish may be served by adding, just before the cheese, three-fourths a cup of cold
A straightforward chafing-dish supper dish that depends on two things: a properly reduced tomato pulp and cheese added off the heat. Both are easy to get wrong at the table.
- The hinge: add the cheese last, away from the flameAdd the cheese last — the recipe adds it only after the macaroni is thoroughly heated, then says to lift with fork and spoon and serve at once. Parmesan held over direct heat in a sauce can turn grainy, so it is worth taking the pan off the heat before folding the cheese in.
- Reduce the tomato before you startHalf a cup of "well-reduced tomato pulp" means at least a cup of sieved fresh tomato (the recipe says reduce "to at least half its bulk") cooked down slowly until thick. Tomato paste loosened with water is a fair substitute; passata will not do without reducing it first, or the sauce will be thin and sharp.
- PapricaPaprika. A quarter teaspoon; the paprika sold for American kitchens at this period was generally mild, used more for warmth and colour than heat.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of dry macaroni is 4 oz, about 1 cup of elbows. This serves two as a light supper, or four as a small side.
- Rinsing in cold waterDeliberate here, not a mistake: it stops the cooking so the macaroni can be held and finished in the sauce later. Modern practice would leave it slightly underdone, since it finishes in the sauce. Toss it with a little oil if it must wait more than a few minutes.
- Stock"well-seasoned stock" means a household broth already salted and aromatic; the kind is not specified. Use a good stock and taste before adding the specified quarter teaspoon of salt, since commercial stock is already salty.
- The sauce is a small rouxTwo tablespoons butter to one of flour, so it is butter-heavy by later standards. Cook it briefly without colouring, then add the stock and tomato and let it thicken before the macaroni goes in.
- The cut-off endingThe page breaks mid-sentence at "three-fourths a cup of cold." What follows is lost; a cold cooked meat, diced, is the likeliest completion, warmed through in the sauce before the cheese.
Macaroni had been in English and American cookbooks for well over a century by the time this sort of book was written, and the "à la Italienne" tag is often taken to point toward the tomato-and-Parmesan treatment as against the older English style of macaroni baked in cream and cheese sauce, though the tag was used loosely. The instruction to sieve out the tomato seeds and reduce the pulp slowly suggests a cook making her own concentrate. Parmesan, imported and expensive, appears here in a modest quarter cup and is treated as a finishing flavour rather than the body of the dish.