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Macaroni (Palermo Mince onion and fry it)
(Palermo.) Mince 1 onion, and fry it in butter, add a little flour, and 1/2 can of tomatoes, salt, pepper, a spoonful of sugar, and cook 20 minutes. Strain it, add 1 cup each of cooked macaroni, chopped ham, and chicken, and 3 green peppers, cooked, and finely shredded, and free from seeds, the yolk of 1 egg, and 1/2 cup of boiling milk or broth. Stir well, and serve hot.
A Sicilian-style baked-pasta filling done as a stovetop dish: a strained tomato sauce enriched with egg yolk and bulked out with leftover ham and chicken. Two things decide whether it works — the sauce must be smooth before the meat goes in, and the egg yolk must never boil.
- The egg yolkStir the yolk into the hot milk or broth first, then add that to the pan off the heat and stir until it thickens. Dropped straight into simmering tomato sauce it will scramble into threads.
- Half a can of tomatoesCan sizes are not specified and period canning sizes varied, so the amount is approximate. About half a 14.5 oz can of tomatoes with their juice works for this quantity of other ingredients.
- Straining the sauceTwenty minutes of cooking then a pass through a sieve is what gives this its texture; it is closer to a thin tomato sauce than a chunky one. Press hard on the solids and discard the skins and seeds.
- Green peppersThe recipe asks only that they be cooked, shredded fine and seeded; the method is left open, so boiling, roasting or charring and skinning will all serve. Three peppers is a lot of bulk relative to a cup of macaroni, and two large ones is closer to a modern balance.
- MacaroniCooked pasta, drained, measured after cooking. Elbows or short tubes hold the sauce; cook them a minute short of package time since they will sit in hot liquid.
- Flour and butter"A little flour" means enough to bind the onion and butter — about a tablespoon each of butter and flour for this quantity. Cook the flour a minute before the tomatoes go in or the sauce tastes pasty.
- The ham and chickenThis is a leftovers dish. Both are already cooked, so they only need to heat through; long simmering dries the chicken out.
- YieldServes three to four as a light main course. It reheats poorly once the yolk is in, so make what you will eat.
The parenthetical "(Palermo.)" is doing the work of a citation, marking the dish as something eaten in Sicily rather than as an established American dish. What it actually resembles is a deconstructed anelletti al forno or timballo, the Palermitan baked pasta built on tomato, ham, peas or peppers and often bound with egg, served here as a stirred dish instead of a molded and baked one. The ham-and-chicken combination points to a household using up the remains of yesterday's roast. Canned tomatoes are worth noting too: by 1900 they were cheap and reliable in the United States, and cookbooks of the period reach for them without apology in dishes that in Italy would have used fresh fruit or conserva.