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Macaroni Au Gratin
Boil for three-quarters of an hour three-quarters of a pound Italian macaroni in three quarts water with a tablespoon salt. Drain well on a sieve and place in a saucepan with one ounce good butter, adding two tablespoons flour. Mix well, then pour in two light gills hot milk. Gently mix again, season with half teaspoon salt, a light saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Add one ounce grated Swiss cheese and one ounce grated Parmesan cheese. Gently mix with a wooden spoon, and when the cheese is thoroughly mixed transfer the macaroni into a baking dish. Sprinkle a little grated Swiss cheese over and bake in a hot oven for fifteen minutes, or until of a nice golden colour. Remove and serve.
A plain béchamel-and-cheese baked macaroni from the era when pasta was boiled far longer than anyone would tolerate now. Two things need adjusting: the boiling time and the fact that the sauce is built around the drained macaroni rather than separately.
- The boiling time is the hingeThree-quarters of an hour will reduce modern dried macaroni to paste. Today's extruded semolina pasta wants 8-10 minutes, and for a dish that bakes afterwards, pull it 2 minutes short of the package time.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so "two light gills" is a scant cup of milk. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so the nutmeg is 1/4 teaspoon and the cayenne slightly less.
- A hot ovenRead that as roughly 400-450F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is enough to brown the top cheese; the interior is already hot when it goes in.
- Making the sauceTossing butter and flour into the pan with the drained macaroni gives you raw-flour flavour unless you are careful. Cook the butter and flour together for a minute or two before the milk goes in, or make the béchamel in a separate pan and fold the macaroni through it.
- Cheese quantitiesTwo ounces of cheese total for three-quarters of a pound of macaroni is restrained by current taste. Doubling both cheeses gives a richer result without unbalancing the sauce.
- "Swiss cheese"In a book of this period this means Gruyère or Emmental, not the mild pre-sliced supermarket product sold under that name. Gruyère melts smoothly and browns well.
- YieldThree-quarters of a pound of dry macaroni serves four as a main course or six alongside something else.
Baked macaroni with cheese was already an old dish in English and American cookery by the time this book appeared. The seasoning here is a recognisably French treatment: two cheeses in equal parts, cayenne and nutmeg, and the whole thing browned briefly rather than baked into a casserole. Gratin names the browned crust, conventionally traced to the verb gratter, to scrape, for what stuck to the dish.