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Macaroni and Tomato Sauce
Break enough macaroni into inch lengths to make a pint. Boil till tender in salted water, about thirty minutes. Drain, add Tomato Sauce and serve with or without grated cheese.
A skeleton recipe of the kind that assumes the cook already has a tomato sauce standing by. The only thing that needs real attention is the boiling time.
- Thirty minutes is too longLong boiling was standard in period recipes, and dried macaroni of the time was generally coarser and heavier-walled than today's. Modern dried elbow or cut macaroni is done in 7-10 minutes; check the box and start tasting two minutes early.
- A pint of macaroniMeasured dry, broken into inch lengths, that is about 8 oz by weight, which swells to roughly 4 cups cooked. Enough for four as a side dish or three as a main.
- Inch lengthsMacaroni was sold in long straight tubes then, hence the instruction to break it. Bought elbow macaroni or ziti needs no breaking.
- Salting the waterThe recipe gives no quantity. About a tablespoon of salt per four quarts is the working figure; the pasta takes on no other seasoning here, so under-salted water shows in the finished plate.
- Draining and dressingDo not rinse. Drain and combine with the hot sauce at once so the starch on the surface helps it cling; macaroni left sitting in the colander sets into a mass.
- The tomato sauceThe capitalised "Tomato Sauce" points to a separate recipe elsewhere in the book, which is not reproduced here. Any plain tomato sauce serves; about 2 cups for this quantity.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" is unspecified here; in American books of the period it could mean imported Parmesan or a grated hard domestic cheese. Parmesan or a well-aged pecorino is a reasonable choice.
Macaroni reached the American middle-class table long before tomato sauce became its automatic partner. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American cooks treated it as a delicate baked dish with cream and cheese, and Jefferson's household is often credited with popularising the pasta itself in the United States. The pairing with tomatoes was already present in English and American cookbooks before the era of mass Italian immigration, and by the time of books like this one it had been absorbed into ordinary Anglo-American dinner cookery, stripped of garlic and herbs and reduced to a plain, economical formula.