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How to Cook Macaroni
Have in a saucepan three quarts boiling water. Season with half tablespoon salt. Plunge in half pound best quality unbroken macaroni and boil for forty minutes. Neatly drain on a sieve and use as required.
A plain method rather than a dish, and the one thing in it that has changed completely is the timing.
- Forty minutes is the sticking pointModern dried semolina macaroni is done in 7-11 minutes; check the box and start tasting two minutes early. Forty minutes will reduce it to paste. Anglo-American taste of the period ran to much softer pasta than we now expect, and long boils of this kind were the norm in English-language books.
- Salt the water harderHalf a tablespoon in three quarts is barely a trace. A common modern proportion is 1 to 1 u00bd tablespoons of table salt (more by volume if using coarse kosher salt) per three to four quarts, so the pasta seasons from the inside.
- "Unbroken macaroni"This means the long straight tubes sold in lengths, not the short elbows the word now brings to mind. Long macaroni is coiled into the pot as the ends soften rather than snapped. Elbows or ziti work identically here.
- Water quantityThree quarts for half a pound is generous by today's standards and perfectly sound; it keeps the water at a rolling boil when the pasta goes in and dilutes the released starch.
- DrainingA sieve is fine, but do not rinse if the macaroni is going into a sauce or a baked dish, since the surface starch is what makes sauce cling. Rinse only if it is going cold into a salad or is to be held.
- YieldHalf a pound of dry pasta gives roughly four modest servings as a side, or two as a main, and about four cups cooked.
Instructions like this one appear at the head of the macaroni chapter in many large American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because dried Italian pasta was still an ingredient many cooks had to be told how to handle. It arrived in quantity through the same trade and immigration that brought olive oil and Parmesan into ordinary grocery lists, and it was usually treated as a base for cheese sauce, baked timbales or soup rather than as a course in its own right. The long boil recorded here reflects both the pasta of the day and a kitchen convention that persisted for decades: al dente as a standard belongs to later Italian cooking as it was absorbed abroad, and English-language books of this period routinely called for twenty minutes to an hour.