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Macaroni with Tomatoes
Take three pints of beef soup, clear, and put one pound of macaroni in it, boil fifteen minutes, with a little salt; then take up the in it, boil fifteen minutes, with a little salt; then take up the macaroniwhich should have absorbed nearly all the liquid-and put it on a flat plate, and sprinkle grated cheese over it thickly, and pour over all plentifully a sauce made of tomatoes, well boiled, strained, and seasoned with salt and pepper.
A pasta cooked by absorption in beef broth rather than drained from water — closer to a risotto method than to modern boiled pasta. The text as printed contains an obvious typesetting slip, repeating the phrase "in it, boil fifteen minutes"; read it once.
- The hinge: absorption, not boilingThe macaroni is meant to drink up nearly all the broth, which is what carries the beef flavour into the pasta. Use a wide pan, keep the heat at a steady simmer, and stir often so the starch does not catch on the bottom.
- Three pintsSix cups of broth to one pound of dry macaroni. That is a workable ratio for absorption, though older macaroni was thicker-walled and thirstier; keep a little extra hot broth at hand in case the pan goes dry before the pasta is tender.
- Fifteen minutes is optimisticMacaroni of this period was commonly sold in long hollow tubes that were snapped short, and such pasta generally wanted longer to soften than modern shapes. Modern dried elbows will be done in 8-11 minutes, and cooking them until the liquid has gone will overshoot. Judge by the pasta, not the clock, and finish the last of the broth off the heat if need be.
- "Clear" beef soupAn unthickened, degreased beef stock or consommé. Low-sodium beef broth stands in; if you use a salty commercial stock, hold back the salt entirely until you taste at the end, since the liquid reduces onto the pasta and concentrates.
- Grated cheeseThe recipe specifies only "grated cheese," which would have been a dry cheese suitable for grating: Parmesan if available, or a hard cheddar. Either works; the cheddar makes a noticeably richer, sharper plate.
- The tomato sauceSimply cooked-down tomatoes pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed, salted and peppered. About 2 lb fresh tomatoes or a 28 oz can, simmered 20-30 minutes and strained, gives enough to pour "plentifully" over a pound of macaroni.
- ServingThe dish is assembled on a flat platter and served at once, not baked. Cheese sprinkled on hot pasta melts into it under the sauce; if it stands, the whole thing stiffens. Serves six as a side, four as a main.
Macaroni reached the American South as a fashionable, faintly foreign luxury, and Southern cookbooks of the later nineteenth century treat it with some ceremony: boiled in broth rather than plain water, and commonly finished with grated cheese. What distinguishes this version from the more common baked macaroni-and-cheese of the same books is the tomato: canned and bottled tomatoes had become cheap and widely available by the 1880s, and a strained, seasoned tomato sauce poured over cheese-strewn pasta might be seen as anticipating the shape of Italian-American cooking a generation before that cooking was widely known in the United States. The absorption method here — pasta swelling in a measured quantity of savoury broth — is arguably the older European approach, and it appears in domestic manuals well after the drain-and-sauce method became common.