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May 12
Menu: Fried Fish, Tartare Sauce; Calves' Tongues Sorrel Puree; French Pigeon Pie; Macaroni, a l'Italienne; Polish Salad; Apricot Parfait; Coffee; roll it a little larger than size of dish;; after wetting it, cut off band of; paste to put round edge of dish; wet; band again and place remainder; paste on. Press it down very lightly,; to make edges adhere; pare and notch; them neatly according to taste; brush; top with cold water, and dust fine; sugar over, then put in oven to bake; for 1 hour. When fruit tart begins to; boil out at side it is usually ready. Macaroni, a l'Italienne-14 pound macaroni, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons Crisco, salt and paprika to taste, 1/2 cup brown stock, 1½ cup tomato pulp, and 1/2 cup grated May 14 cheese. Make sauce of Crisco, flour seasonings, stock, and tomato pulp. Tomato pulp should be quite thick from long cooking. Add macaroni, cooked until tender, in boiling salted water, rinsed and drained. Reheat in double boiler, adding cheese meanwhile. Serve when cheese is melted and whole is very hot.
Two things are running together here: the finish of a covered fruit tart and a complete macaroni dish. Both are workable, though the macaroni needs one quantity read with care.
- Macaroni weightThe pasta quantity prints as "14 pound," which is a lost fraction. Against 2 tablespoons of flour, 1½ cups tomato pulp and ½ cup stock, a quarter pound (about 4 oz dry) is the sensible reading; a full pound would leave the sauce nowhere near sufficient.
- CriscoStill sold and unchanged in function: a solid vegetable shortening. In the sauce it is simply the fat for a roux, so butter or oil substitutes directly at the same measure.
- Brown stockA period term for a dark meat stock made from browned bones and vegetables. Beef stock, unsalted, is the modern equivalent; season at the end since the cheese brings salt of its own.
- Tomato pulpNot tomato juice or passata straight from the bottle. The instruction that it be "quite thick from long cooking" is the hinge of the dish, since the sauce is thickened as much by reduction as by the flour. Reduce canned crushed tomatoes hard before measuring.
- The cheeseThe recipe does not name the cheese. For a dish of this kind a hard grating cheese such as Parmesan is the likely intent. Add it off direct heat, as the recipe does, so it melts rather than seizes into strings.
- Double boilerUsed here only to reheat without scorching the tomato. A heavy saucepan over low heat, stirred, does the same job in less time.
- Tart oven and timingThe recipe gives no oven temperature, only a one-hour bake. The visual cue given, juice boiling out at the side, remains the reliable test of doneness.
Procter & Gamble published cookbooks promoting Crisco in the years after it came to market, written by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. One of them, A Calendar of Dinners, assigned a full day's menus to each date of the year, which is why stray day markers sit among the recipes. The book's purpose was frankly commercial: hydrogenated cottonseed oil was a new substance, and readers had to be shown that it would do everything butter and lard did, in pastry, in frying and, as here, in a roux. Macaroni a l'Italienne appears in American cookbooks well before this date, generally meaning pasta in a tomato sauce with grated cheese.