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Macaroni with Tomato Sauce
Reheat Boiled Macaroni in one and one-half cups of Tomato Sauce I, sprinkle with grated cheese, and serve; or prepare as Baked Macaroni, using Tomato in place of White Sauce.
Macaroni à l'Italienne ¾ cup macaroni ½ cups Tomato Sauce II 2 quarts boiling salted water ½ cup grated cheese 1/2 onion 2 tablespoons wine 2 cloves 1½ tablespoon butter Cook macaroni in boiling salted water, with butter and onion stuck with cloves; drain, remove onion, reheat in Tomato Sauce, add cheese and wine. Macaroni, Italian Style 1 cup macaroni 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1½ cups scalded milk 2/3 cup grated cheese Salt and paprika 1/4 cup finely chopped cold boiled ham Break macaroni in one-inch pieces and cook in boiling salted water, drain, and reheat in sauce made of butter, flour, and milk, to which is added cheese. As soon as cheese is melted, season with salt and paprika, and turn on to à serving dish. Sprinkle with ham, and garnish with parsley.
Three short variations on the same idea, written in the shorthand of a book that assumes you already have its sauce recipes to hand. A few of the quantities have been mangled by the printing and need judgment.
- Butter quantityThe macaroni and cheese quantities in Macaroni a l'Italienne match the printed page as our text now gives them: 3/4 cup macaroni and 1/2 cup grated cheese. The "1 1/2 tablespoon butter" in the same list is still odd, since the butter only flavors the cooking water; start with a tablespoon or less.
- Tomato Sauce I and IIBoth are recipes given elsewhere in the book; this page only cross-references them. Any smooth, unsweetened tomato sauce of pouring consistency stands in — the recipe calls for 1½ cups to 3/4 cup of dry macaroni.
- Macaroni of the periodDried macaroni of this date was thicker than most modern pasta and took correspondingly longer to soften; the recipe gives no time. Modern dried pasta wants a firm boil to just short of al dente, since it finishes in the sauce. Two quarts of water per cup of macaroni is generous by today's standards but harmless.
- The clove-studded onionHalf an onion stuck with two cloves goes into the cooking water, not the sauce, and is picked out after draining. It is a stock-making habit carried into the pasta pot; the perfume it leaves is faint.
- The wineUnqualified "wine" in American cookery of this period often meant sherry or Madeira rather than table wine, though the book does not say. Add it at the end, off the heat.
- Cheese"Grated cheese" is unspecified; Parmesan or a dry aged cheddar both suit. In the third variation the cheese melts into a butter-flour-milk sauce, so grate it fine and stir it in off direct heat to keep the sauce from breaking.
- If you bake itThe "prepare as Baked Macaroni" option sends you to that recipe elsewhere in the book, substituting tomato sauce for white. No oven heat or time is given on this page.
- YieldNo yield is given; three-quarters to one cup of dry macaroni makes a small dish. Salt the sauce rather than the finished dish — the cheese and, in the last version, the ham both carry salt.
Macaroni sits in the Cereals chapter rather than anywhere near a chapter on Italian cooking, and that placement — as it is traditionally described — tells you how American households of the period seem to have understood it: as a starch, a farinaceous food in the same family as rice, hominy and oatmeal, to be dressed with a white sauce and cheese in the English manner. The two "Italian" variations here are gestures toward a foreign style rather than transcriptions of one — an onion stuck with cloves, a spoonful of sherry, chopped ham scattered on top — assembled at a moment when large-scale Italian immigration to the northeastern United States was well underway but tomato-and-pasta cooking had not yet entered the mainstream American repertoire. Dried macaroni was evidently familiar enough that a school teaching economical cookery to Boston housekeepers found it worth treating at length.