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Boiled Macaroni
3/4 cup macaroni broken in inch pieces 2 quarts boiling water 1 tablespoon salt 1/2 cup cream Cook macaroni in boiling salted water twenty minutes or until soft, drain in strainer, pour over it cold water to prevent pieces from adhering; add cream, reheat, and season with salt.
A plain boiled macaroni with cream, from the era when pasta was filed under cereals and cooked far past what we would now call done. Two things need adjusting: the boiling time and the cold-water rinse.
- Twenty minutes is too longModern extruded dry macaroni is done in 7-9 minutes. Cook to the package time, taste, and stop while there is still some resistance, since the macaroni gets a second heating in the cream.
- The cold rinseRinsing washes off the surface starch that would otherwise help the cream cling. It is worth skipping unless you are holding the macaroni to finish later, in which case rinse, drain well and toss with a little butter.
- Quantity of saltA tablespoon in two quarts is about right by current standards -- roughly 1 percent -- so leave it. Then taste before adding more at the end, as the cream carries very little of its own seasoning.
- "Cream"Household cream of the period was probably nearer today's light cream (about 18-20 percent fat) than heavy cream, though gravity-separated cream varied a good deal in richness. Heavy cream will work but will coat more thickly; thin it with a spoonful of the pasta water if it tightens.
- ReheatingWarm the cream and macaroni together gently over low heat; hard boiling will reduce the cream and can leave it greasy.
- YieldThree-quarters of a cup of dry macaroni is about 3 oz -- two small side servings. Scale up by weight rather than by cup measure if you are feeding more, since broken pieces pack unevenly.
- FinishingThe original stops at salt. White pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, or grated cheese stirred in off the heat are all period-appropriate and keep it from tasting flat.
American cooks of the 1890s understood macaroni as a starch dish, a farinaceous food, nutritionally interesting because it was wheat in a convenient form rather than because it was Italian. Fannie Farmer's book came out of the Boston Cooking School, where cookery was taught as applied domestic science, and pasta was recommended in that spirit -- cheap, digestible, a vehicle for milk and cheese. The very long boiling time was standard advice in English and American books of the period. Serving it simply dressed with cream, with cheese as an optional extra in adjacent recipes, sits alongside the baked macaroni and cheese that appears a few pages away in the same book.