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Macaroni, Suisse
Boil three-quarters of a pound of best macaroni in three quarts water with a teaspoon salt for forty minutes. Drain on a sieve, return to the saucepan, season with half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, adding one ounce good butter and two ounces grated Swiss cheese; carefully mix with a fork until well amalgamated, transfer to a deep dish. Nicely brown a very finely chopped white onion in a frying pan with a tablespoon butter for eight minutes, frequently mixing meanwhile, then pour over macaroni and serve.
A plain pasta dish that needs only one real correction: the boiling time belongs to an era of much harder, thicker dried macaroni.
- Forty minutes is the hingeLong boiling times of this order are common in period cookbooks, whatever the reason. Modern extruded elbows are done in 8-10 minutes; follow the package and taste from about 7 minutes on, or you will get paste.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg over three-quarters of a pound of pasta is assertive but correct for the style; scale back if your nutmeg is potent.
- Swiss cheeseIn a book of this vintage this means genuine Gruyere or Emmental, not the mild processed slices sold as "Swiss" today. Two ounces is a modest amount, so use the sharpest true Alpine cheese you can find and grate it fine so it melts into the hot pasta.
- Return it to the pan hotThe cheese and butter are melted only by residual heat from the drained macaroni, so drain quickly and do not rinse. Reserve a few tablespoons of the cooking water to loosen the mixture if it tightens.
- White pepper and appearanceWhite pepper here is partly a matter of looks, keeping the dish pale under the browned onion. Black pepper will do if you do not mind the specks, though the flavour is not identical.
- The onionEight minutes over moderate heat in a tablespoon of butter, stirred often, gives a soft golden onion rather than deep caramelization. Watch the butter; it will brown before the onion does if the pan is too hot.
- "Deep dish" means a serving dishNothing is baked. The dish goes to the table as soon as the onion is poured over, so warm the serving dish first.
- YieldThree-quarters of a pound of macaroni serves four as a side or three as a light main.
"Macaroni, Suisse" is less a Swiss national dish than a French-kitchen shorthand: the name evokes Gruyere-type cheese, butter and browned onion, the flavours associated with the Alpine cantons. The dish sits in the long line of European cheese-and-pasta preparations that predate the baked, bechamel-bound macaroni cheese now standard in English-speaking kitchens; here the cheese simply coats the hot pasta, and the browned onion supplies both the seasoning and the garnish.