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Foame Macaronia
Cut in very small square pieces a pound raw lean mutton, half pound raw lean veal and two ounces raw lean ham. Finely chop two ounces raw beef marrow and place it in saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter, one finely chopped onion and half a chopped green pepper, gently brown for ten minutes, add meat, mix well and cook for fifteen minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Pour in two gills pure tomato sauce, a gill broth, mix well, cover pan, set in oven for thirty-five minutes, remove and keep hot. Boil a half pound of macaroni in a quart boiling water with teaspoon salt for thirty minutes and drain on a sieve. Lay half the macaroni in a lightly buttered earthen casserole dish, season with three saltspoons salt and two saltspoons pepper, sprinkle with two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese and pour hash over. Place remainder macaroni on top, sprinkle over three saltspoons salt, two saltspoons pepper and two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese. Divide a half ounce butter in small bits on top of hash, pour a gill tomato sauce over, set in oven for thirty-five minutes, remove and serve.
A baked macaroni with a three-meat ragù, written in the compressed shorthand of a professional chef's notebook. Two things need attention before you start: the salt and the pasta timing.
- Total salt is far too highTotal salt is high -- Between the meat and the two macaroni layers the recipe calls for about two and a half teaspoons of salt, plus a further teaspoon in the pasta water. A teaspoon in the meat and a light seasoning of each macaroni layer is plenty, particularly since the Parmesan brings its own.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato sauce is one cup, and the broth and the final sauce pour are half a cup each.
- Thirty minutes of boiling is too longDried macaroni of the period was often a heavier, thicker extrusion than today's. Modern elbows or ziti want 6 to 8 minutes, and since they go on to bake for another 35, drain them a minute or two shy of al dente.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Treat both oven stages as a moderate oven, 350F: the meat stage is a covered braise and the final bake only needs to heat through and set the top.
- Beef marrowTwo ounces of raw marrow is the fat that carries this dish. Ask a butcher for marrow bones and scoop it out, or substitute an equal weight of beef suet, or of butter (about four tablespoons). The flavour is less round but the texture holds.
- "Hash" and "casserole"Hash here simply means the cooked minced-meat mixture, not a fried potato dish. The earthen casserole is the baking dish itself, glazed earthenware or stoneware of about two quarts.
- Cutting the meat"Very small square pieces" means hand-diced to about a quarter inch, not ground. It is worth the knife work: the finished dish has a texture no minced version reproduces.
- YieldAbout a pound and three quarters of meat with half a pound of dry macaroni serves six generously as a main course.
The International Cook Book collects dishes from many countries; the names in its sections are often transliterations several removes from their source, and "Foame Macaronia" appears to be one of them rather than a title any Italian or Romanian cook would recognise. The dish itself is straightforward enough to place: a layered baked macaroni with a hand-diced meat ragù, a close relative of what American cookbooks would soon be printing as baked macaroni with meat sauce. Two details date it. The first is the beef marrow, standard enrichment in professional kitchens of the period and steadily displaced by butter and oil over the following decades. The second is the mutton, which seems to have carried much of the dish's flavour in an era when mutton is generally said to have been ordinary market meat in the United States and not, as it later became, a thing you had to go looking for.