Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Curried Macaroni
Curried Macaroni
Put a quantity of macaroni in a saucepan of salted water and boil for twenty minutes; remove, drain, put it in a saucepan with some curry sauce and simmer it gently for from five to ten minutes. Keep each piece of macaroni separate and do not allow it to be cooked to a paste. Serve it hot. Macaroni, Genovese Style Boil half a dozen fresh pork sausages in stock; when cooked drain and let them get cold. Boil the necessary quantity of macaroni in salted water and when thoroughly tender turn it out onto a sieve to drain. Cut the sausages in slices and arrange them with alternate layers of the macaroni on a deep dish, strewing grated Parmesan cheese between each layer. Pour over the contents of the dish some nicely-flavored rich veal gravy, cover the dish and place it in a slow oven for about one hour. Serve the macaroni very hot in the dish in which it was cooked.
Macaroni, Italian Style Boil three-fourths of a pound of macaroni, place it in a saucepan with one gill each of tomato and Madeira sauces, and one-fourth of a pound of grated Parmesan cheese, season with pepper and nutmeg to taste, and cook slowly for ten minutes, tossing slowly but frequently. Arrange on a hot dish, and serve with grated cheese separately. (2.) Boil one-fourth pound of macaroni in water until tender, then add one breakfast cupful of milk and thicken with flour and water. Now add two tablespoonfuls of made mustard, and a proper seasoning of pepper, salt and cayenne. Stir in one-half pound of grated Parmesan cheese, boil for a few minutes longer, and serve.
Macaroni, Milanese Style Cut a piece of lean veal and two ounces of raw ham into moderate-sized pieces, put them into a stewpan with a chopped onion and carrot, and a sufficient quantity of butter, and fry until nicely browned, adding one wineglassful of white wine and stock to cover. Put in a bunch of sweet herbs, including a few sprigs of parsley, a small bottleful of tomato sauce, and a few chopped mushrooms. When boiling move the stewpan to the edge of the fire, and stew the contents gently for three hours. Next, strain the gravy through a fine sieve; put the other ingredients, with the exception of the bundle of herbs, into a mortar, and pound to a smooth paste; then return the mixture to the stewpan with the gravy, and boil it gently for twenty or thirty minutes longer. Boil the required quantity of macaroni and drain it well; cut some milk cheese into slices. Strain the gravy into another stewpan, put in two ounces of butter broken into small pieces, and keep it hot at the edge of the fire. Arrange the macaroni and slices of cheese in layers in a deep dish with grated Parmesan cheese over them, moisten with the above gravy, dust a small quantity of powdered cinnamon over the top, and cover the dish. Place it in a slow oven, and leave for an hour. At the end of that time take it out of the oven, and serve while very hot in the same dish.
Macaroni, Neapolitan Style Place a saucepan of water on the fire, boil it up, and put into it one heaping teaspoonful of salt; as soon as it boils up again, throw in one pound of macaroni, let it boil for half an hour, then drain in a colander. Grate six or eight ounces of cheese; put a layer of the boiled macaroni in a deep dish, sprinkle it with grated cheese, and so on until the dish is full. Pour over it some hot gravy. Melt on the fire one-fourth of a pound of butter, pour it over the top, and serve as hot as possible.
Six macaroni preparations run together in one block, all built on the same assumption: that macaroni is a vehicle for a sauce or gravy made separately. The one thing to overturn throughout is the boiling time.
- Boiling timesTwenty minutes, thirty minutes and "thoroughly tender" all belong to the coarse, slow-drying commercial macaroni of the 1890s. Modern dried macaroni is done in 8 to 11 minutes, and for the versions that go on to bake for an hour you want it pulled two minutes short of that. The recipe's own warning "do not allow it to be cooked to a paste" is the hinge for every variation here.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The Italian-style dish therefore takes half a cup of tomato sauce and half a cup of Madeira sauce for three-quarters of a pound of macaroni, which is a restrained amount of liquid by modern habit.
- A slow oven300 to 325F. At that heat an hour is a gentle set-and-melt rather than a browning, which is the point in the Genovese and Milanese versions: the gravy should be absorbed, not reduced to a crust.
- "Milk cheese"In the Milanese recipe this most likely means a fresh, mild, sliceable cheese rather than Parmesan, which is called for separately in the same dish. A low-moisture mozzarella or a young fontina does the job.
- Rich veal gravyA rich veal gravy is assumed to be made separately, as a house preparation. A reduced brown veal or chicken stock, lightly thickened, is the equivalent; unreduced boxed stock will leave the baked dish watery.
- Made mustard, breakfast cupful"Made" mustard is prepared mustard from the jar, not dry powder. A breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces; treat it as a cup. Two tablespoons of prepared mustard against a quarter pound of macaroni is assertive, and worth halving on a first attempt.
- Sausages boiled in stockThe Genovese method poaches fresh pork sausages, cools them, then slices and bakes them for an hour. Poach them through to an internal 160F rather than by eye.
- Quantities and yieldOnly the Italian and Neapolitan versions state a weight of macaroni. Figure two ounces of dried macaroni per person as a side and three to four as a main; a pound of macaroni, Neapolitan style, serves six to eight.
- Curry sauceThe first recipe assumes a curry sauce made separately, in this period usually a flour-thickened stock-based sauce seasoned with curry powder. Whatever you substitute, simmer the drained macaroni in it only long enough to coat, closer to five minutes than ten.
Oscar Tschirky was never the Waldorf's chef; he was its maitre d'hotel, and his 1896 book collects the kitchen's working repertoire rather than his own cooking. That macaroni gets six treatments here, each labeled with a city or a style, shows how the dish sat in an American luxury hotel at the end of the century: Italian in name, French in method, and served as a course in its own right rather than as a side. The Neapolitan version, layered with grated cheese and drenched in butter and gravy, is close to what Italian immigrants and returning Grand Tourists had been describing for decades. The curried version belongs to a different current entirely, the Anglo-Indian curry powder that had reached well-stocked American pantries by the 1890s and was applied to nearly anything. Note also that Parmesan is the named cheese in four of the six, at a time when it was among the Italian cheeses that travelled and kept well enough to cross the Atlantic.