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Savory Macaroni
Crisp a little chopped bacon in a frying-pan, add a medium-sized onion sliced, and brown delicately.
Toss up with this two cups of cold macaroni or macaroni and cheese until well mixed. Cover and set where it will warm through slowly.
A skillet reheat for yesterday's macaroni, and it works as written. The points below fill in what the original leaves to the cook's judgment.
- QuantitiesTwo cups of cooked macaroni serves two as a side or one as a supper dish. Two or three slices of bacon and one onion is the right proportion; more bacon and the dish turns greasy rather than savory.
- "Crisp" the bacon, then keep the fatRender the chopped bacon slowly in a cold pan so the fat comes out before the meat browns. That fat is the cooking medium for the onion and the only seasoning fat in the dish, so do not pour it off.
- "Brown delicately"Medium-low heat, eight to ten minutes, until the onion is soft and just golden. Hard browning gives bitter edges that dominate a dish this plain.
- Cold macaroni behaves differentlyRefrigerated pasta is stiff and clumped. Break it apart with your fingers before it goes in the pan, or toss it with a spoonful of water so the strands separate instead of shearing.
- "Set where it will warm through slowly"In a coal-range kitchen this meant the cool end of the stovetop or the warming shelf. Use the lowest burner setting with the lid on, ten to fifteen minutes, or a covered dish in a 300F oven.
- If you are using leftover macaroni and cheeseThe cheese will want to break and go oily over direct heat. Keep the pan low and stir once or twice; a tablespoon of milk added with the pasta helps it come back together.
- SeasoningThe original assumes the bacon does the work. Taste before salting, and add pepper generously — this is a dish that reads flat without it.
Books of this kind proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when household economy was treated as a skill on par with cookery itself, and chapters on the use of left-overs were often placed without embarrassment beside those on roasts. Macaroni had by then become an American pantry staple rather than an Italian novelty — dried and cheap — which is why a cook would plausibly have two cups of it sitting cold in the larder. The method here appears to be a familiar rescue formula: bacon fat and onion, applied to almost anything, on the sound principle that browned aromatics and a little cured pork will make yesterday's starch taste deliberate. The instruction to "set where it will warm through slowly" is a small piece of vanished kitchen geography, assuming a range with a permanent gradient of heat across its surface and a warming shelf above it.