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Baked Macaroni
Put Macaroni with White Sauce in buttered baking dish, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown.
This is an assembly note rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already made the book's Macaroni with White Sauce, which is boiled macaroni folded into a medium béchamel. A few numbers the original leaves out.
- The base sauceThe book's Macaroni with White Sauce is boiled macaroni bound in a medium white sauce. A workable modern proportion is about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, with salt and pepper, to roughly 1 cup of dry macaroni cooked and drained. Make it slightly looser than you think you need, since the pasta keeps absorbing liquid in the oven.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 400F on an upper rack; the dish is already hot and cooked through, so the only job is browning the top, which takes 15 to 20 minutes.
- Buttered crumbsCrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly 1 tablespoon butter to 1/4 cup crumbs. Soft crumbs from torn stale bread, pulsed in a processor, brown more gently than fine dry commercial crumbs.
- The hingeBake only until the crumbs colour. Longer and the sauce breaks or dries into the pasta, which is what turns baked macaroni pasty.
- Macaroni of the periodMacaroni was commonly sold in long tubes to be broken into inch lengths rather than in the small elbows usual now. Elbows or ziti work; cook them a minute short of done, since they finish in the oven.
- Cheese is optional hereFannie Farmer treats cheese as a separate variation rather than a given. If you want it, stir grated cheese into the hot sauce off the heat, and keep some in the crumb topping.
- YieldA cup of dry macaroni with this quantity of sauce fills a 1-quart dish and serves four as a side, two or three as a supper.
Its placement under "Cereals" rather than with meats or vegetables reflects how nineteenth-century American cookbooks classified food: macaroni was a farinaceous or starch food, shelved beside rice, hominy and oatmeal, and valued in the household-economy literature of the day as a cheap source of what was then called nutriment. Macaroni had been familiar in the United States since the early republic, but it spread widely only after domestic factory production made dried pasta inexpensive in the second half of the century. The method here is the standard Anglo-American treatment rather than an Italian one: boil the pasta soft, bind it in a milk-and-flour white sauce, crumb the top and brown it, which is the same buttered-crumb gratin finish the book applies to scalloped oysters, fish and vegetables. Cheese, the element that now defines the dish, appears in this tradition as an addition one may make, not as the point of it.