Home › Macaroni and Other Pastes › Macaroni with Meat and Sauce (Maccheroni al sugo di Carne)
Macaroni with Meat and Sauce (Maccheroni al sugo di Carne)
Take one-half pound of beef without fat. Prepare the ham fat as in the preceding receipt, chopped up with onion, celery, and parsley. Cut the meat into several pieces, put it with the fat, etc., into a frying-pan. Add salt and pepper. Cook until the meat is colored, then add two tablespoons of wine, white or red. When the wine is absorbed add two tablespoons of tomato paste dissolved in hot water. (Or tomato sauce as in preceding.) Boil all together for five minutes, with cover on the saucepan, then add one cup of boiling water, and allow it to simmer until the meat is thoroughly cooked--about one-half an hour. Boil and strain the macaroni as before, and pour over it the sauce from the meat. Mix well, and serve with the meat in the middle and the macaroni around it, with cheese (grated Parmesan) sprinkled over it. This dish can be made with veal or mutton instead of the beef.
A southern Italian sugo in miniature: the meat flavours the sauce, the sauce dresses the pasta, and both go to the table on one platter. The recipe leans on the receipt printed before it, so a few gaps need filling.
- The ham fatThe "preceding receipt" most likely means fat trimmed from prosciutto or a similar dry-cured ham, chopped fine with onion, celery and parsley into a rough battuto. The recipe gives no quantity; a couple of ounces suits this amount of meat, and pancetta or unsmoked bacon substitutes well, with 2 tablespoons of olive oil if you have neither.
- Choose the cut for the methodHalf a pound of lean beef simmered 30 minutes wants a piece with some connective tissue — chuck or shin cut into two or three chunks. A lean steak cut will be dry and stringy by the time the sauce has body. If you use shin, expect closer to 90 minutes rather than 30.
- Tomato paste quantitiesTwo tablespoons of concentrated paste dissolved in roughly half a cup of hot water gives about the strength intended. Early twentieth-century conserva was often thicker and saltier than modern tube paste, so salt at the end rather than the start.
- Don't rush the browning"Cook until the meat is colored" is the hinge. Dry the meat, give it room in the pan, and let it take real colour before the wine goes in; the sauce has nothing else to build depth from in half an hour.
- Wine and waterLet the wine reduce until the pan is nearly dry before the tomato goes in, or the sauce keeps a raw edge. The cup of boiling water should be added hot so the simmer is not interrupted.
- "Boil and strain the macaroni as before"Salt the water generously — the sauce is not seasoned for the pasta as well — and drain rather than rinse. Reserve a little cooking water to loosen the sauce when you mix.
- YieldEnough for two as a full meal, or four as a first course with about 3/4 lb of macaroni, though the recipe itself gives no pasta quantity. The whole platter, meat in the centre and pasta ringed round it, is what this recipe directs; serving the meat afterwards as a second course is also common.
Simple Italian Cookery (1912) was written by Antonia Isola — the pen name of Mabel Earl McGinnis, an American who had lived in Italy — and it belongs to the earliest wave of Italian cookbooks aimed at English-speaking home cooks rather than at professional chefs. In dishes like this one its assumptions lean southern: dried macaroni, tomato, and a sauce built on cured pork fat rather than butter. The dish itself is the domestic ancestor of what many families still call simply il sugo: a single piece or few pieces of meat stewed slowly in tomato so that one pot yields both the dressing for the pasta and the meat course that follows it. The instruction that veal or mutton may stand in for beef suggests an everyday, use-what-you-have formula rather than a fixed composition, and the tomato conserva dissolved in hot water reflects a period when concentrated paste, sun-dried and sold in dark blocks or tins, was a reliable way to have tomato in the kitchen out of season.