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Ham with Macaroni
Boil a scant three-quarters cup of broken macaroni in plenty of boiling, salted water until tender -about forty minutes. This should make two cups when cooked. Drain and rinse well under cold water so it will not be pasty. Add four tablespoonfuls of grated cheese. Reheat over hot water, adding enough cream or milk to moistenabout one tablespoonful. When well heated mix in lightly with a fork one cup chopped cooked ham that has been moistened with four tablespoonfuls of mustard sauce (see page 75). This makes a good luncheon dish, and can be prepared with two cups of any cold macaroni and cheese.
A thrifty luncheon assembly rather than a baked casserole — everything is warmed through in a double boiler, so the components need to be right before they go in.
- Ignore the forty minutesPeriod recipes routinely gave boiling times of half an hour or more for macaroni, whether because the dry tubes were thicker or simply because a much softer result was wanted. Modern dried elbows or broken tubes are done in 8 to 12 minutes; cook to just tender, since it gets reheated afterwards.
- QuantitiesThree-quarters cup of broken dry macaroni yields roughly two cups cooked, which still holds. If you are using leftover macaroni and cheese instead, two cups is the target and you can skip the added cheese.
- The cold rinseThis is deliberate, not fussiness — it strips surface starch so the pasta reheats loose instead of gluey. Drain it well afterwards or the tablespoon of cream will be diluted.
- "Reheat over hot water"A double boiler, or a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. Direct heat will scorch the cheese and dry the milk out before the centre is warm.
- Mustard sauceThe cross-reference is to a separate recipe in the same book, on page 75. Any thick mustard cream sauce works; four tablespoons is enough to coat a cup of chopped ham without making it wet.
- Fold, do not stirThe ham goes in last and "lightly with a fork" for a reason: it is already cooked, and beating it through hot cheesy macaroni shreds it into paste.
- SaltCured ham and grated cheese together carry a great deal of salt. Salt the pasta water normally but taste before adding any more at the end.
- YieldNo yield is given, but two cups of macaroni with a cup of ham would stretch to roughly two lunch portions, or three with bread and a salad.
The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a genre that flourished in American and British households from the 1890s through the First World War, when domestic-science writers set out to prove that thrift could be systematic rather than shameful. Ham was a natural centrepiece of such books: a cured leg was bought whole, sliced hot for one meal, and then had to be worked through in diminishing form for days. Macaroni was the ideal partner — cheap, shelf-stable, and by this period thoroughly domesticated in English-speaking kitchens, where it had been paired with grated cheese since the eighteenth century. The mustard sauce is the telling detail: without it the dish is bland scraps, and a sharp sauce is what makes reheated meat read as a deliberate dish rather than a remainder.