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Macaroni, Rice, Polenta, And
OTHER ITALIAN PASTES¹ No. 182. Macaroni with Tomatoes Ingredients : Macaroni, tomatoes, butter, onion, basil, pepper, salt.
Fry half an onion slightly in butter, and as soon as it is coloured add a purée of two big cooked tomatoes. Then boil quarter of a pound of macaroni separately, drain it and put it in a deep fire-proof dish, add the tomato purée and three tablespoonsful of grated Parmesan and Cheddar mixed, and cook gently for a quarter of an hour before serving. This dish may be made with vermicelli, spaghetti, or any other Italian paste.
A very short sauce and a quarter-pound of pasta, written for a reader who had probably never boiled macaroni before. The one thing to watch is the final quarter-hour of cooking.
- Undercook the pastaThe macaroni goes back on the heat for fifteen minutes after draining, so boil it several minutes short of al dente — around two-thirds of the package time. Fully cooked pasta given another quarter-hour will collapse.
- Quantities and yieldA quarter-pound (about 115 g) of dried macaroni with two tomatoes and three tablespoons of cheese feeds two as a first course, one as a main. Scale straight up; the sauce is forgiving.
- The basilBasil is listed in the ingredients but never appears in the method. Add a few torn leaves to the tomato as it reduces, or scatter them over at the table.
- "Fire-proof dish"This likely means earthenware or enamelled iron of the kind that could take direct heat, rather than a modern glass baking dish. Use a saucepan or small casserole on low heat, or cover it and put it in a moderate oven for the fifteen minutes.
- Tomato puréeHere purée means the pulp of two cooked fresh tomatoes pushed through a sieve, not the concentrated paste sold in tubes today. Two large ripe tomatoes, or about a cup of tinned chopped tomatoes cooked down and sieved, is right.
- Parmesan and CheddarThe Cheddar may well be a concession to English shopping and English purses, Parmesan being imported and dear. All Parmesan makes a cleaner dish; the Cheddar adds body and a little stringiness.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper are listed but never mentioned again. Salt the pasta water well and taste the tomato before it meets the cheese, which brings its own salt.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was Mrs W. G. Waters's attempt to sell Italian cooking to a British readership, framed as ten days of talk and menus among a house party in the manner of Boccaccio. At the time food in England was often said to mean little more than macaroni, usually boiled to softness and baked with cheese sauce in the manner of a nursery pudding; the book's insistence that pasta is a family of shapes to be dressed with a quickly made sauce, and that the sauce can be nothing more than onion, butter and two tomatoes, was the useful news. The closing line — that the dish works equally with vermicelli, spaghetti "or any other Italian paste" — is doing quiet educational work, telling readers that the shape is a variable and not a different dish. "Paste" here is simply the older English rendering of pasta, still the ordinary word in cookbooks of the period.