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Macaroni with Sauce
(Maccheroni al sugo) The most appreciated kind of macaroni are those seasoned with tomato sauce or with brown stock (see nos. 12 and 13). The macaroni are boiled as above, then drained in a colander, returned to the saucepan and mixed with the sauce and grated cheese. For those who like it some butter may be added in the mixing. 17
A skeleton recipe that assumes you have already read the pages before it: the boiling method and the two sauces are cross-referenced rather than repeated. What follows fills in what a 1919 Italian household took for granted.
- The hinge: drain, return, toss over heatThe hinge: drain, return, mix -- The pasta goes back into the saucepan before the sauce and cheese are added, not onto a plate to be topped. The recipe says nothing about heat or cooking water; tossing briefly over a low flame, with a spoonful of the starchy cooking water, is a modern habit that helps the sauce cling.
- "Boiled as above"The boiling method is given on the preceding pages rather than repeated here. Modern standard practice is about 4 quarts water and 1 tablespoon salt per pound of dry pasta, cooked to the low end of the package time. Anglo-American cookbooks of the period commonly called for far longer boiling than Italian practice, though this book says nothing here about how firm the pasta should be.
- What "macaroni" means hereIn this book maccheroni covers dry factory pasta broadly, most often a hollow tube. Any sturdy dried shape -- ziti, rigatoni, penne, bucatini -- suits a meat-based sugo.
- Sauces nos. 12 and 13The order of the sentence suggests no. 12 is the tomato sauce and no. 13 the one the text calls "brown stock"; in Italian usage sugo di carne often means the concentrated juices of a braise rather than a soup stock. Modern equivalents: a simple tomato sauce, or the reduced pan juices from a braised beef or pork.
- The cheeseThe book does not name a cheese. A grated hard cheese of the period would usually be a Parmigiano type in the north, aged pecorino further south. Grate it fresh; pre-grated cheese melts into the sauce less readily.
- Quantities and yieldNone are given. Reckon 3 to 4 oz dry pasta per person, roughly 1/2 cup of sauce and 2 tablespoons of grated cheese for each, with a tablespoon of butter for the whole panful if you want it.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was aimed at American readers at a moment when pasta was still shifting from an exotic import to a pantry staple, and its terse, cross-referenced entries reflect an Italian domestic tradition where technique was assumed and only the variation needed writing down. The word sugo means simply juice or gravy, and in the Italian kitchen it is often said to have referred first to the meat juices of a braise -- the tomato version, listed here as an equal alternative, was the newer arrival, documented from the late eighteenth century and spreading more widely as tomato cultivation and canning took hold in the nineteenth. The instruction to return the drained pasta to the pan and mix it with sauce and cheese is the durable core of the dish, and it is generally taken to be the point on which Italian practice differs most sharply from the Anglo-American habit of ladling sauce over a plated mound.