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Macaroni with Butter
Plunge in lightly salted water half pound best Italian macaroni and boil for forty minutes. Drain on a sieve. Replace the macaroni in the cleared pan. Season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; add one ounce good butter, lightly mix with a fork until the butter is thoroughly melted, add one ounce grated Parmesan and one ounce grated Swiss cheese. Gently mix with a fork while cooking for five minutes and serve.
A plain butter-and-cheese macaroni that predates the boxed version. Almost everything translates directly except the boiling time, which is the one number to ignore.
- Forty minutes is far too longModern extruded dried macaroni is done in 8-10 minutes; check the box and taste at the low end. Period macaroni was often thicker-walled and dried differently, and period recipes generally call for pasta cooked soft rather than al dente. Forty minutes today gives paste.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne in half a pound of macaroni is assertive but not unreasonable; scale it back to a pinch if you are cooking for people who do not expect heat.
- "The cleared pan"Simply the cooking pot, emptied of water and wiped dry. Returning the pasta to the hot pan is what melts the butter without a second burner.
- Keep the heat low for the final five minutesParmesan and Gruyere-type Swiss will string and then break into grease if the pan is hot. Off the heat, or on the lowest setting, stirring with a fork as directed. A spoonful of the pasta water helps the cheese emulsify into a sauce rather than a clump.
- The cheeses"Swiss" here most likely means Gruyere or Emmental, which melt and stretch; the Parmesan supplies salt and savour. An ounce of grated cheese is roughly a quarter to a third of a cup depending on the cheese and the grate, and it is a restrained amount by modern standards.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. A saltspoon of pre-ground nutmeg tastes dusty and will dominate a dish this simple.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon of added salt assumes the pasta water was only lightly salted, as the recipe says. If you salt the water properly, taste before adding any more.
- YieldHalf a pound of macaroni with three ounces of butter and cheese serves two as a main course or four as a side. Serve at once; it stiffens as it cools.
This is the older, simpler ancestor of American macaroni and cheese: no white sauce, no baking dish, no breadcrumb top, just pasta tossed with butter and two grated cheeses in the pot. The combination of Parmesan for savour and an alpine cheese for melt is standard practice across northern Italy and Savoy, and the nutmeg is a survival of the medieval and Renaissance habit of spicing cheese dishes, which lingered in pasta and gratin cookery long after it had left most savoury food. The long boil, often startling to modern readers, tells you plainly that nobody in this kitchen was aiming for al dente.