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Macaroni with Butter and Cheese (Maccheroni al Burro)
Boil and drain the macaroni. Take four table-spoons of table-butter, three tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese, add to the macaroni in the sauce-pan, mix well over the fire, and serve.
Four lines of text and no quantities beyond the butter and cheese, which is about right for a dish this old and this simple. What the recipe assumes, and does not say, is that the pasta goes back into a warm pan with a little of its own cooking water.
- Quantity of macaroniThe original gives none. Four tablespoons of butter and three of grated cheese are a modest dressing, enough for somewhere in the region of half a pound to a pound of dry pasta depending on how richly you want it coated.
- Save the cooking waterDrain, but keep half a cup of the starchy water. Adding a few spoonfuls as you toss is what turns butter and cheese into a sauce rather than a greasy coating with dry crumbs in it.
- "Mix well over the fire"This is the hinge. Keep the heat very low, or off the burner entirely, and toss constantly. Parmesan tends to separate and string if the pan gets too hot; the pan should be warm enough to melt the butter and no warmer.
- Table-butterGood-quality butter of the kind served at table, as distinct from cheaper butter or fat kept back for cooking; the term does not tell us whether it was salted or sweet. Either works, but salt the pasta water generously in either case, as neither the butter nor the cheese is doing that job alone.
- ParmesanGrated from a wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano or grana padano. The pre-grated shelf-stable kind contains anti-caking agents that refuse to melt smoothly and will leave the dish gritty.
- Macaroni in 1912The word covered dried tubular and long pastas broadly, not only the short elbows sold under that name now. Any sturdy dried shape suits it; cook to just firm, since it will spend another minute in the pan.
- Serve at onceThere is no holding this dish. It sets and dulls within a couple of minutes of leaving the pan, so warm the plates and bring it straight to the table.
Simple Italian Cookery appeared in 1912 under the pen name Antonia Isola, one of a small group of early English-language books that tried to explain Italian home cooking to American households at a time when large-scale Italian immigration was making its ingredients newly available. Dishes like this one were part of the argument: that Italian food was not all long-simmered tomato and garlic, and that a plate of pasta could be finished in the time it took to drain it. Maccheroni al burro belongs to the same family of plain butter-and-cheese pasta dishes as what Americans later learned to call fettuccine Alfredo, and the older, plainer version he pan's own heat — is often described as the thing you eat when nothing else appeals.