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Macaroni, Baked, with Cheese
Do not wash the macaroni. Break it into inch lengths and throw it into salted boiling water. Stir frequently to prevent it from settling to the bottom, and boil rapidly with the pan uncovered; forty-five minutes is none too long to allow for its cooking. Turn it when done into a colander and drain well. Arrange a layer of macaroni in the bottom of a pudding dish, upon it strew some rich cheese (Parmesan is generally used) and scatter over this some bits of butter. Add a sprinkling of salt and pepper, then another layer of macaroni and cheese; fill the dish in this order, having macaroni at the top, buttered well but without cheese. Add a few spoons of milk and bake until of a golden-brown hue, one-half hour being usually sufficient. Serve in the dish in which it was baked.
A pre-béchamel macaroni cheese: layered, buttered, barely moistened, and baked until the top browns. The one thing to ignore is the boiling time.
- Forty-five minutes is now forty-five minutes too manyMacaroni of this period came in long, thick, hard-dried tubes (hence the instruction to break it into inch lengths) and wanted a much longer boil than we give pasta now, though forty-five minutes is generous even by period standards. Modern dried elbows or broken tubes need 7-10 minutes, and since they will bake for another half hour, drain them two minutes short of the package time.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumes a range you judge by hand. Bake at 375F for the half hour specified; that will brown the buttered top without drying the interior.
- Pudding dishAn ordinary deep baking dish, roughly 2 quarts, which is also the serving vessel — the recipe ends by telling you to bring it to table. A shallow dish gives more browned surface, a deeper one more soft centre.
- "A few spoons of milk"This is a dry, layered casserole rather than a sauced one, and a few spoonfuls is deliberately sparing. If you want it creamy rather than crusty, pour in enough milk to come about halfway up the layers before baking, but understand that you are departing from the recipe.
- "Rich cheese"Parmesan alone reads sharp and salty to modern palates and does not melt into strings. A mix of grated Parmesan with a good aged cheddar or Gruyère is closer to what the phrase intends and behaves better under heat.
- Don't wash the macaroniStill sound advice: rinsing strips the surface starch that helps cheese and butter cling. The book gives no reason for the instruction.
- SaltSalt the boiling water properly and go lightly on the sprinkling between layers — Parmesan and salted butter carry most of the seasoning.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Half a pound of dry macaroni suits a 2-quart dish and serves about four; a pound needs a three-quart dish and serves six as a side.
The Butterick Publishing Company sold dress patterns first and domestic advice second, and its cook book reflects the tastes of a broad middle-class readership at the end of the nineteenth century. Baked macaroni with cheese is often said to have reached American tables by way of English practice, where it had been a genteel dish since the eighteenth century; Thomas Jefferson is often credited with popularising both the pasta and a macaroni machine after his time in Europe, a claim more repeated than documented in detail. The insistence that Parmesan is "generally used" marks the dish as slightly refined: imported grating cheese was a specialty-grocer item, and the layered, lightly moistened construction here sits alongside the roux-and-milk sauce that would define the dish in twentieth-century American cookbooks.