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Macaroni with Cheese
1 cup macaroni. 1 1/3 cup white sauce. 1/4 cup chopped or grated. cup chopped or grated cheese Buttered crumbs (see page 29) Break macaroni into pieces one inch long, boil, strain and rinse. Stir cheese into hot, well-seasoned white sauce and put macaroni and sauce in buttered baking dish in layers; sprinkle buttered crumbs on top and brown well in hot oven.
For other meat substitutes see special vegetable recipes. Vegetables should. form a large part of our daily diet. They contain water and mineral matter and also health-promoting vitamines. In addition they contain woody fibres or cellulose which stimulate the intestines.
The ingredient list has been clipped in the original printing — only the cheese and crumbs survive — so the quantities for macaroni, milk, butter and flour have to be supplied from the book's own white sauce proportions. What follows fills in the gaps and points out where 1920s practice differs from ours.
- Working quantitiesFor one cup of grated cheese, use about 8 oz dry macaroni and roughly 2 cups of medium white sauce (2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 2 cups milk, salt and pepper). That serves four as a main dish, six as a side.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period a hot oven is roughly 400-450F. Since everything in the dish is already cooked, the only job is browning the crumbs, so around 425F for 15-20 minutes is enough; longer risks the sauce separating.
- Melt the cheese off the heatThis is the hinge. Stir the grated cheese into the white sauce after it comes off the burner and let the residual heat do the work. Cheese boiled in a sauce turns grainy and weeps fat.
- Rinsing the macaroniThe instruction to strain and rinse belongs to an era of longer boiling and softer pasta; rinsing washes off surface starch that would otherwise help the sauce cling. Cook to just short of tender, drain, and skip the rinse unless you are holding the pasta before assembly.
- Inch-long piecesThe instruction to break implies the long tubes commonly sold at the time. Elbow macaroni or any short tube needs no cutting.
- Buttered crumbsThe book's cross-reference (page 29, not reproduced here) will mean dry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter; about 1 tbsp butter to 1/2 cup crumbs is a workable ratio. Fresh crumbs will also work but brown faster and scorch more easily at 425F.
- The cheese itself"Chopped or grated cheese" is unspecified, but in a book of this date and place it would most likely have meant a firm American or Cheddar-type cheese. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that can make the sauce chalky; grate from a block.
- LayeringAlternate macaroni and sauce rather than stirring them together, as written, and finish with sauce under the crumbs. Bare pasta on top dries to splinters in a hot oven.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given free to policyholders — part of an effort to improve policyholders' health, which was also, of course, a commercial interest in lowering mortality. That explains the closing paragraph here, which has nothing to do with macaroni: the spelling "vitamines" follows the form Casimir Funk coined in 1912, though the older spelling persisted in popular and institutional publications well into the 1920s and beyond, so it cannot narrowly date the text. The phrase "meat substitutes" is equally of its moment, carrying both the wartime and postwar pressure to stretch scarce meat and the era's new nutritional confidence that cheese could stand in for it. Baked macaroni with a cheese-enriched white sauce and a crumb top had been standard in English and American cookery since well before this, generally traced through eighteenth-century English cookbooks to Italian pasta dishes; what the insurance company added was the argument that you ought to eat it.