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Macaroni, Rice, Polenta, And: Ingredients
No. 183. Macaroni alla Casalinga Ingredients : Macaroni, butter, stock, cheese, water, salt, nutmeg.
Cut up a quarter pound of macaroni in small pieces and put it in boiling salted water.
When sufficiently cooked, drain and put it into saucepan with two ounces of a butter, add good gravy or stock, three tablespoonsful of grated Parmesan and Cheddar mixed, and a tiny pinch of nutmeg. Stir over a brisk fire, and serve very hot.
No. 184. Macaroni al Sughillo Ingredients : Macaroni, stock, tomatoes, sausage, cheese.
Half cook four ounces of macaroni, drain it and put it in layers in a fireproof dish, and gradually add good beef gravy, four tablespoonsful of tomato purée, and thin slices of sausage. Sprinkle with grated Parmesan and Cheddar, and cook for about twenty 1 Italian pastes of the best quality can be obtained at Cosenza's, Wigmore Street, W. For the following dishes, tagliarelle and spaghetti are recommended. minutes. Before serving pass the salamander over the top to brown the macaroni.
No. 185. Macaroni alla Livornese Ingredients :
Macaroni, mushrooms, tomatoes, Parmesan, butter, pepper, salt, milk.
Boil about four ounces of macaroni, and stew four or five mushrooms in milk with pepper and salt. Put a layer of the macaroni in a buttered fire-proof dish, then a layer of tomato purée, then a layer of the mushrooms and another layer of macaroni. Dust it all over with grated Parmesan and Cheddar, put it in the oven for half an hour, and serve very hot.
No. 186. Tagliarelle and Lobster Ingredients :
Tagliarelle, lobster, cheese, butter. between each layer add a little butter. Strew grated cheese over the top, put it in the oven for twenty minutes, and brown the top with a salamander.
No. 187. Polenta Polenta is made of ground Indian-corn, and may be used either as a separate dish or as a garnish for roast meat, pigeons, fowl, &c. It is made like porridge; gradually drop the meal with one hand into boiling stock or water, and stir continually with a wooden spoon with the other hand. In about a quarter of an hour it will be quite thick and smooth, then add a little butter and grated Parmesan, and one egg beaten up. Let it get cold, then put it in layers in a baking-dish, add a little butter to each layer, sprinkle with plenty of Parmesan, and bake it for about an hour in a slow oven. Serve Boil half a pound of hot. a tagliarelle, and cut up quarter of a pound of lobster.
Butter a fire-proof dish, and strew it well with grated Parmesan and Cheddar mixed, then put in the tagliarelle and lobster in layers, and No. 188. Polenta Pasticciata Ingredients: Polenta, butter, cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes.
Prepare a good polenta as above, put it in layers in a fire-proof dish, and add by degrees one and a half ounces of melted butter, two cooked mushrooms cut up, and two tablespoonsful of grated cheese. (If you like, you may good-sized tomato mashed up.) Put the dish in the oven, and before serving brown it over with a salamander. add a No. 189. Battuffoli Ingredients: Polenta, onion, butter, salt, stock, Parmesan.
Make a somewhat firm polenta (No. 187) with half a pound of ground maize and a pint and a half of salted water, add a small onion cut up and fried in butter, and stir the polenta until it is sufficiently cooked. Then take it off the fire and arrange it by spoonsful in a large fire-proof dish, and give each spoonful the shape and size of an egg.
Place them one against the other, and when the first layer is done, pour over it some very good gravy or stock, and plenty of grated Parmesan. Arrange it thus layer by layer. Put it into the oven for twenty minutes, and serve very hot.
A run of Italian pasta and polenta dishes written for an Edwardian English kitchen, with quantities given loosely and oven heat described rather than measured. Two things need saying before anything else: the text of No. 186 has been scrambled in transcription, and the salamander that finishes half these dishes is simply your grill or broiler.
- The garbled lobster recipeNo. 186 has had its lines transposed in the original setting. Read in order: boil half a pound of tagliarelle, cut up a quarter pound of lobster meat, butter a fireproof dish and strew it with grated Parmesan and Cheddar, layer the pasta and lobster with a little butter between each layer, top with cheese, bake twenty minutes and brown under the grill.
- SalamanderA flat iron plate on a handle, heated in the fire and held over a dish to colour the top. A grill or broiler on high for two or three minutes does the same job; watch it, since a cheese crust goes from brown to black quickly.
- Oven temperaturesA slow oven for the baked polenta in No. 187 is around 300F/150C, and an hour at that heat should set the layers through. The unspecified ovens in Nos. 185, 186 and 189 are best read as moderate, 350F/180C.
- Ground Indian cornMaize meal, sold now as polenta or coarse cornmeal. Avoid fine cornflour and avoid quick-cook polenta if you want the firm sliceable set these layered dishes depend on. The quarter hour of stirring in No. 187 suits a medium grind; a coarse traditional grind wants 35-45 minutes.
- Polenta proportionsNo. 187 gives no ratio at all. No. 189 does: half a pound of maize to a pint and a half of salted water, which is roughly 225g to 850ml, a stiff porridge that holds its shape in spoonfuls. For a softer polenta use closer to a litre of liquid to the same meal.
- Parmesan and Cheddar mixedNot an error; probably a concession to cost and availability in an English kitchen. Straight Parmesan or Grana Padano is closer to the Italian original; if you keep the Cheddar, use a dry mature one so it does not go oily.
- Sausage in No. 184Thin slices of a cured Italian salame or a fresh Italian sausage, not a British breakfast sausage. If using fresh sausage, brown the slices first, as twenty minutes buried in pasta will not cook raw meat reliably.
- Tomato puréeIn 1901 this means passed and reduced fresh tomatoes or a light conserva, not the dense triple-concentrate in tubes. Four tablespoons of modern tube paste would overwhelm No. 184; use passata, or thin the concentrate with stock to a saucelike consistency.
- YieldThe quarter pound of macaroni in No. 183 feeds two as a first course. Nos. 184 and 185 at four ounces serve two to three; the half pound of tagliarelle in No. 186 and the half pound of maize in No. 189 serve four.
These numbers come from The Cook's Decameron, Mrs W. G. Waters's 1901 collection, which framed a course of Italian cookery inside a Boccaccio-style conceit of ten diners telling ten days' worth of dishes. It was aimed at English households for whom macaroni was more familiar as a milk pudding, which is why the footnote bothers to name a shop in Wigmore Street where decent dried pasta and tagliarelle could actually be bought, and why Cheddar is allowed to stand in beside Parmesan throughout. The polenta entries are the more telling half: maize reached Italy from the Americas in the sixteenth century and became the staple carbohydrate of the north, and polenta pasticciata and battuffoli are both economical dishes, ways of turning cooled cornmeal into something worth putting on a table with butter, cheese and good stock. Casalinga means simply housewifely or home-style; battuffoli is generally taken to refer to the little lumps or wads the polenta is shaped into.