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Baked Macaroni
Chop two hard-cooked eggs rather coarse, season with pepper and salt, and mix lightly with two cups of cooked macaroni. Put in a buttered baking-dish and half fill with milk. Cover with buttered crumbs, place thin strips of bacon on top, and bake until the bacon is crisp.
A thrifty supper built from three things a 1910 kitchen always had left in the cold room: boiled macaroni, hard-cooked eggs and the end of a side of bacon. The instructions assume more judgment than they state, so a few decisions are worth making in advance.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the recipe is timed to the bacon. Bake at 375F; the strips will crisp in about 25 to 30 minutes, by which time the milk will have set around the macaroni. Much hotter and the bacon browns before the interior heats through.
- "Half fill with milk"Most likely milk poured to roughly half the depth of the filled dish rather than half the volume of the dish, though the phrasing is ambiguous. For two cups of macaroni in a small baking dish that is somewhere around a cup. Too much and you get soup under a crust; too little and the top layer dries out.
- Dish sizeTwo cups of cooked macaroni plus two eggs fills a 1-quart baking dish, no deeper than about two inches. A shallow dish is what makes the bacon-and-crumb ratio work.
- Buttered crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly two tablespoons butter to a half cup of crumbs, until they are evenly coated but not sodden. Fresh soft crumbs will absorb the milk and go pasty.
- The baconModern supermarket bacon is sliced thicker and cured wetter than the "thin strips" intended here. Use the thinnest slices you can buy, and lay them flat rather than overlapping, or they will steam instead of crisping and leave the crumbs greasy.
- Leftover macaroniIf you are cooking macaroni specially, stop it short of tender. It will absorb milk in the oven and turn soft; genuinely leftover, slightly firm macaroni behaves better than freshly boiled.
- SeasoningThe eggs are the only seasoned element as written, which reads bland to a modern palate. Salt and pepper the milk as well, and a little grated cheese or dry mustard stirred into it is entirely in keeping with the period.
- YieldTwo generous portions as a supper dish, or four as a side. It does not reheat well a second time; the crumbs and bacon go limp.
Books of "left overs" were a distinct genre in American and British publishing from the 1890s through the First World War, written for a range of households with a great deal of food to account for. Yesterday's boiled macaroni, a couple of eggs hard-cooked for a salad, and bacon ends are reassembled into a dish that reads as intentional. Macaroni had by then been an English-speaking staple for well over a century, generally arriving dried in long pipes to be broken up and boiled, and the crumb-and-cheese gratin treatment was standard enough that a cookbook could assume the reader knew what "buttered crumbs" meant without further explanation. The bacon on top does double duty, seasoning the dish and basting the crust as it renders, which is the kind of economy the whole genre was built on.