No. 2959
Macaroni Baked
Macaroni au Gratin
A three-line finishing instruction that assumes you have already made No. 2961, macaroni Parisian style — creamed macaroni bound with butter, cheese and a little velouté or cream. Read this as a gratin topping method rather than a standalone recipe.
- The cross-reference is the recipeThe macaroni is dressed according to No. 2961, so that entry has to be consulted for the sauce and seasoning; this page supplies only the gratin finish. Without a sauce the crumb crust simply sits on dry pasta.
- Bread-raspingsRaspings are the crust rasped or grated from a stale loaf, then dried and sieved — coarser and drier than fresh crumbs, closer to modern dried breadcrumbs. Toss them with the melted butter before strewing so they colour evenly instead of scorching in patches.
- A hot ovenNo temperature is given; period 'hot oven' is generally read as somewhere in the region of 400-450F. The macaroni goes in already cooked and hot, so the oven's only job is to set and brown the crust.
- Buttered and bread-crumbed dishButter the dish, then dust the inside with raspings and tip out the excess. This gives a browned crumb shell on the sides and bottom as well as the top, and lets a portion lift out cleanly.
- Cook the macaroni shortPeriod boiling directions tend to run considerably longer than modern practice. Since it will bake again, stop it short of fully tender or the finished gratin will be soft under the crust.
- Smooth the topAn even surface browns uniformly; peaks of macaroni standing above the sauce dry out and harden in a hot oven.
Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, gave macaroni a number of entries in The Epicurean (1894) — Neapolitan, Milanese, Sicilian, Parisian — reflecting how thoroughly Italian pasta had entered the French haute-cuisine repertoire by the end of the century. Au gratin in this period is generally taken to mean specifically the browned crust, from the French gratter, to scrape: the crust that was scraped from the dish. The buttered-and-crumbed mould, the dried raspings and the very hot oven are the standard professional method of the era, applied here to pasta exactly as they would be to a gratin of cardoons or sole. Note also that Ranhofer routinely built recipes as chains of cross-references — a reminder that these books were written for kitchens with a copy always open on the table.