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Macaroni with White Sauce
½ cup macaroni broken in inch pieces 2 quarts boiling water 1 tablespoon salt 1½ cups White Sauce Cook as for Boiled Macaroni, and reheat in White Sauce. White Sauce. Melt two tablespoons butter, add two table spoons flour with one-half teaspoon salt, and pour on slowly one and one-half cups scalded milk.
A plain béchamel-dressed macaroni from the era before boxed macaroni and cheese. The whole dish hinges on cooking the flour and butter together long enough to lose its raw taste before the milk goes in.
- Cook the roux firstMelt the butter, stir in the flour and let the paste bubble for a full two minutes over low heat before adding any liquid. Fannie Farmer's terse phrasing hides this step, and skipping it is what makes homemade white sauce taste pasty.
- Scalded milkHeating the milk to just below a simmer is usually explained as a way of dealing with souring bacteria and enzymes in unpasteurised milk. It still helps: warm milk whisks into a roux without lumping. Pasteurised milk needs no scalding for safety.
- Sauce proportionsTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1½ cups milk gives a lightish sauce, roughly the consistency of heavy cream — on the thin side of what is usually called a medium white sauce. If you want it to cling more, go to three tablespoons of each.
- Macaroni of the periodTurn-of-the-century macaroni came in long hollow tubes, hence "broken in inch pieces." Any short tubular pasta — elbows, ditalini, penne — works directly; ½ cup dry is roughly 2 oz.
- Cooking the pastaThe book's Boiled Macaroni, which this recipe refers to but which is not reproduced here, calls for a longer boil than modern pasta needs. Modern dried pasta needs 8-11 minutes; take it a minute short of done since it finishes in the sauce.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt to two quarts of water is about right for seasoning pasta and is not all absorbed. The half teaspoon in the sauce is the whole seasoning otherwise — taste and add pepper and a grating of nutmeg if you want it to taste of anything.
- YieldAs written this serves two as a side dish. Double everything for four, and it scales cleanly.
- Where it leadsStir in a cup of grated sharp cheese off the heat and you have macaroni and cheese; top with buttered crumbs and bake at 400F until browned for the casserole version.
White sauce is a backbone of the Boston Cooking School method — it was taught as a formula in a few graded thicknesses that students then applied to vegetables, fish, eggs and pasta alike, which is why this entry can be four lines long and still be complete. Macaroni was commonly grouped with grains and starches in American cookbooks of the period rather than treated as a dish in its own right, and pasta was largely bought by the pound as a pantry staple rather than forming the centre of a meal. The great mass of Italian immigration that reshaped American pasta cooking was arriving in these same decades.