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Boiled Macaroni
Pour one pint boiling water over five ounces macaroni, let stand half an hour, drain and put in a custard -kettle with boiling milk or milk and water to cover, cook till tender, drain, add a table-spoon butter, and a tea-cup cream, and season with salt and pepper; grate cheese over the top and serve. - Mrs. S. R. T.
A gentle, milk-poached macaroni from the era before boxed dinners — closer to a creamed vegetable side than to baked mac and cheese. The whole method depends on cooking the pasta slowly in dairy rather than in salted water.
- Custard-kettleThis is a double boiler — an inner pan set over simmering water. Use one, or a heavy saucepan over the lowest possible heat, because milk scorches on direct heat.
- The half-hour soakSoaking in boiling water softens and partly hydrates the macaroni so it will finish in milk without demanding a long simmer. Do not skip it; five ounces of dry pasta will drink an unreasonable amount of milk otherwise.
- Macaroni then and nowNineteenth-century macaroni was often long, thick, hollow tubes, much of it imported, and it may well have been firmer than modern extruded elbows. If you use standard elbows, cut the soak to about fifteen minutes and check for tenderness early.
- A tea-cup of creamA tea-cup in these books is generally reckoned at somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of a cup, and smaller than a coffee cup, though usage varies from book to book. Heavy or light cream both work; add it off the heat.
- Drain, but keep it looseThe second draining is the step most likely to go wrong. Drain the milk off while the macaroni is still slightly moist and slack — if you drain it dry, the butter and cream have nothing to cling to and the dish turns pasty.
- The cheeseNo cheese is specified; a firm aged Cheddar or an imported Parmesan would both suit. Grate it over the hot macaroni so it melts from residual heat; there is no baking or browning in this recipe.
- SeasoningBecause the pasta never meets salted water, the only salt is what you add at the end. Season assertively, and taste after the cheese goes on.
- YieldFive ounces of dry macaroni with cream and cheese serves three or four as a side dish.
Macaroni reached American tables as a genteel, faintly foreign luxury: for much of the nineteenth century it was largely imported dried pasta, sold by the pound and treated as a delicacy to be dressed with milk, butter and cheese rather than tomato, though domestic manufacture existed in the United States from the middle of the century onward. Cookbooks of the period often treat it as a starchy accompaniment to meat in the same slot as potatoes or rice. Thomas Jefferson's enthusiasm for macaroni and Parmesan is the origin story usually cited for the American taste for the dish, though creamed and cheesed macaroni was common in English cookery well before that and arrived by many routes. The attribution to "Mrs. S. R. T." is characteristic of the community-compiled cookbooks of the 1880s, in which contributors' initialled recipes were gathered into a single volume — a form that preserved a great deal of ordinary household practice that never made it into professional cookery texts.