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Timbale of Macaroni
Take a small piece of ham fat, one-half of onion, piece of celery, parsley, small piece of carrot. Chop up fine together. Put into a saucepan, and when the vegetables are fried add two or three mushrooms which have been chopped fine; after five minutes add two tablespoons of tomato paste, thinned with five tablespoons of hot water (or equal quantity of tomato sauce without water). When the sauce is cooked take out the mushrooms and put them on one side.
Take one-half pound of macaroni. Boil in salted water for fifteen minutes, drain, and add the sauce described above. Add two tablespoons Parmesan cheese, grated, and one tablespoon of butter.
Butter well a mold, then cover with a thin layer of bread crumbs the bottom and sides. Pour into the mold one-half the macaroni, then place on it a layer of mushrooms which you have taken out of the sauce. Now add the other half of the macaroni, and then another thin layer of bread crumbs. Put the mold into the oven without turning it over, and bake in a slow oven until well browned. Then turn out and serve.
To this timbale, if desired for variety, cold meat of any kind cut up fine may be added to the sauce; and one egg, hard boiled, and cut into four pieces. Add the egg, and the pieces of meat which you have removed from the sauce, to the timbale at the same time that you add the mushrooms.
A crumb-lined baked macaroni turned out of its mold — closer to a pasta al forno than to the pastry-cased timballo of Italian restaurant cooking. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what a soffritto looks like and gives almost no quantities for it.
- The hinge: undercook the macaroniFifteen minutes suits the thick, coarse dried macaroni of the period. Modern pasta is better boiled a couple of minutes short of al dente, since it keeps absorbing sauce and firming in the oven; fully cooked pasta is more likely to slump when the mold is turned out.
- "Slow oven"Period usage puts this at roughly 300-325F. At that heat the crumbs brown slowly, so allow the better part of an hour. Since the instruction is to bake until well browned rather than to bake gently, 325-350F will give a crisp shell sooner.
- Ham fatThe fat trimmed from a piece of prosciutto or a good country ham. Diced pancetta, or fatty unsmoked bacon, does the same job: roughly 2 oz, chopped with the vegetables so it renders as they soften.
- The soffritto quantities"Small piece" and "one-half of onion" are genuinely open. Half a medium onion, a 3-inch rib of celery, a 2-inch length of carrot and a small handful of parsley gives the balance the sauce expects.
- Tomato pasteItalian conserva was salted and differed in strength from modern double-concentrate tube paste. Two tablespoons of today's paste in five of water is thin and sharp; a short simmer, or using a plain tomato sauce as the recipe permits, gives a rounder result.
- MushroomsTwo or three mushrooms here would most likely have been small field or cultivated buttons. Use about 3 oz, and note that they are lifted out of the sauce and reserved as a middle layer.
- The moldA charlotte mold, straight-sided cake pan or a 1.5-quart soufflé dish. Butter it heavily, then turn dried fine breadcrumbs around the inside so they stick everywhere; the crumb crust does much of the work of releasing it cleanly. Rest 5 to 10 minutes before unmolding.
- Cheese and butterTwo tablespoons of Parmesan for half a pound of pasta is restrained by modern habit. Doubling it does no harm, and grate it yourself — pre-grated cheese is usually treated to stop it caking and melts less smoothly into the sauce.
- YieldHalf a pound of macaroni serves four as a first course, or two to three as a main with the optional meat and egg added.
Timballo takes its name from the drum, as does the French timbale — a reference to the shape of the mold rather than anything about the filling. The grand version, a domed pastry case filled with pasta, ragù, offal and cheese, belonged to Neapolitan and Sicilian aristocratic kitchens and is the dish immortalised in Lampedusa's The Leopard; what appears here is its household descendant, where a lining of buttered breadcrumbs stands in for the crust. The closing suggestion — add whatever cold meat you have, plus a quartered hard-boiled egg — is the everyday logic of the form: the timbale was as much a way of dignifying leftovers as a set piece.