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Macaroni in Cream
Place one and a half tablespoons butter in a saucepan, adding one good tablespoon flour; briskly stir and heat for two minutes, then add one gill hot milk and one gill cold cream. Season with three saltspoons salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; stir well, then drop in the macaroni, and gently cook for two minutes, lightly mixing with a fork; add half ounce grated Parmesan and half ounce grated Swiss cheese. Carefully mix with the fork without breaking while cooking for one minute. Serve very hot.
A plain flour-and-butter sauce enriched with cream and two hard cheeses. The recipe assumes you already have hot boiled macaroni to hand, which is the one thing it never says.
- The missing stepNo quantity or cooking of macaroni is given. Boil about 8 oz dried macaroni in salted water until just tender, drain, and have it hot when the sauce is ready — the two-minute simmer in the sauce will not cook raw pasta.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. So half a cup hot milk and half a cup cold cream, one cup of liquid in total against a tablespoon of flour: a thin sauce that clings rather than blankets.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons salt is 3/4 teaspoon, and a saltspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg is 1/4 teaspoon each. The cayenne at that level is assertive; start with half if you are feeding children.
- Cook the roux properlyTwo minutes of brisk stirring over moderate heat, as the recipe directs, cooks out the raw-flour taste. The recipe adds the hot milk first and the cold cream after; whisk as each goes in.
- Half ounce of cheeseAbout two tablespoons grated, of each. That is a restrained amount by modern habit — this is a cream sauce flavoured with cheese, not a cheese sauce. Doubling it will work but will need a splash more milk.
- Add cheese off the heat, or nearlyParmesan and Swiss cheese of the Gruyere or Emmental sort both break and go stringy if boiled. Stir them in at a bare simmer for the final minute, as directed, and serve at once rather than holding it warm.
- "Without breaking"A fork rather than a spoon keeps the macaroni from being mashed. Fold rather than stir.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. With around 8 oz of macaroni the sauce would stretch to roughly four small side portions, or two as a supper dish.
This is macaroni in the older European manner — boiled pasta bound in a béchamel with grated cheese stirred through — rather than the baked, breadcrumbed macaroni pie familiar to American cooks. The pairing of Parmesan with a Swiss cheese is a sensible one: the Parmesan supplies salt and savour, the Swiss the melt and stretch, and neither dominates. Nutmeg in a white sauce is a very old convention, often traced to the spiced sauces of medieval and Renaissance cookery, and it survived into professional practice long after most other sweet spices had been driven out of savoury dishes. The saltspoon, gill and ounce-by-weight cheese all belong to an older vocabulary of measurement.