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Macaroni, Italienne
Plunge twelve ounces best Italian macaroni in two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt and boil for forty minutes. Drain well on a sieve, then place in sautoir with an ounce butter, two gills tomato sauce, a half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, and mix well with a wooden spoon. Cook for six minutes, add an ounce grated Parmesan cheese, toss well, pour into a deep hot vegetable dish and serve.
A plain tomato-and-Parmesan pasta whose only real problem is the boiling time. Everything else is straightforward once the old measures are translated.
- Forty minutes is far too longTwelve ounces of dried macaroni needs 8-11 minutes, or whatever the box says, and it then gets six more minutes in the sauce. Long boiling times of this sort are common in English-language cookbooks of the period, when pasta was expected to be soft throughout; at forty minutes it will disintegrate.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato sauce is one cup. That is a light coating for 12 ounces of pasta rather than a saucy dish.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making three saltspoons about three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper. That is aggressive by modern taste; a quarter teaspoon is a reasonable starting point.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow. Any wide skillet or saucepan large enough to toss the pasta will do.
- More waterTwo quarts for 12 ounces of macaroni is tight and the water will go starchy and cool when the pasta goes in. Use four quarts, salted more generously than the single teaspoon given.
- CheeseAn ounce of Parmesan is roughly a third of a cup grated fine. Add it off the heat or at the lowest heat so it emulsifies into the sauce instead of seizing into strings.
- YieldServes four as a side or three as a main course.
The name is a piece of period restaurant French: dishes "a l'italienne" on an American or English menu generally signalled tomato and Parmesan rather than anything from an Italian household. Dried macaroni was an imported specialty in the United States for much of the nineteenth century, which is why the instruction specifies "best Italian macaroni" -- domestic pasta of the era was often said to be inferior. The forty-minute boil is the clearest marker of the period: al dente cooking is usually reckoned to have become the norm in English-language cookbooks only well into the twentieth century, and before that pasta was treated much like any other starch to be boiled until thoroughly tender. Its place in a chapter called The World's Kitchen shows how a dish could be filed as foreign while being cooked entirely by French professional method.