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Baked Macaroni or Spaghetti with Cheese
2 cups macaroni or spaghetti 2 tablespoons butter broken into short lengths
1½ cups milk
¼ pound grated cheese
Salt and pepper
Boil and drain the macaroni or spaghetti. Arrange a layer in the bottom of a pudding-dish. Over it sprinkle some of the cheese and scatter over this bits of butter or other fat. Add a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Fill the dish in this order, having macaroni on top, well oiled with butter, but without cheese. Add milk enough to just cover well and bake until a golden brown hue, one-half hour usually being sufficient. Serve in the dish in which it was baked.
A plain layered macaroni bake from the era before cheese sauce became standard. The ingredient list has been mangled by transcription, so read it carefully before you shop.
- Reading the ingredient listThe milk is 1½ cups and the cheese ¼ pound, about a cup grated. "Broken into short lengths" belongs with the spaghetti, not the butter; the ingredient column has the two lines interleaved.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, browns the top in the stated half hour without curdling the milk.
- The cheeseAn American recipe of this vintage calling simply for "grated cheese" would generally mean a firm store cheese, the sort of thing we would now buy as cheddar. Avoid pre-shredded bagged cheese here; the anti-caking starch dulls the browning.
- Boil the pasta shortTwo cups of dry macaroni will absorb milk in the oven and keep cooking. Drain it a minute or two before it is tender or the finished dish will be soft throughout.
- Milk to just coverThe instruction "add milk enough to just cover well" is the hinge. Too much and you get a soupy custard that never browns; the liquid should come to the top layer of macaroni and no higher.
- No cheese on the top layerThe recipe specifies this: the top layer of macaroni is buttered but left bare, so it crisps and colours rather than setting under a cheese crust.
- Dish and yieldA "pudding-dish" is a deep baking dish; something in the region of a 2-quart casserole suits these quantities. This makes about four modest servings as a vegetable course, or two as a main.
The layered method here is older than the roux-based cheese sauce that is now more familiar hthickened by the pasta's own starch as it bakes, a technique shared with scalloped dishes generally. Recipes of this type are generally traced to English and American cookery from the early nineteenth century onward, usually under the spelling "macaroni" alone; the alternative of spaghetti in the title is often said to reflect its comparatively later arrival in ordinary American kitchens.