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Macaroni, a La Pontiffe
(Rome.) This is also made of spaghetti. The original recipe, however, calls for 8 ounces of ribbon macaroni, or lazagnes, cooked 15 minutes in boiling water, and drained. Line a buttered mould with this; fill it with a forcemeat of bread, herbs, and chopped liver, thin slices of chicken and ham, with sliced hard-boiled eggs, and button mushrooms. Add a cup of chicken stock and bake 3/4 hour. Turn it out and serve with a sauce.
This is a timballo — a pasta-lined mould baked with a rich filling and unmoulded whole. The original assumes you know the technique, so the useful work is in the parts it leaves out.
- Ribbon macaroni, or lazagnesThese are flat lasagne noodles, not tubes. Dried lasagne sheets work; break them to lengths that will lie flat up the sides of the mould.
- Cut the boiling timeFifteen minutes will give you pasta too soft to hold a wall. Boil 5 to 6 minutes, until pliable but still firm, then drain and lay the strips flat on a towel so they do not stick together.
- The mouldA charlotte mould, a deep cake tin, or a 1.5-quart pudding basin. Butter it heavily and line it with overlapping strips running up the sides and over the rim, so the overhang can be folded across the top to seal the filling in.
- The forcemeatNo quantities are given. For this size, roughly 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs, 8 oz chicken livers chopped, an egg to bind, and parsley, thyme and marjoram to taste, layered with the sliced chicken, ham, eggs and mushrooms. It should be moist but not loose.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. A moderate oven, 350F, for the 45 minutes given; the filling should register 165F at the centre, since raw liver and chicken are involved.
- The cup of stockAdd it last, poured slowly so it soaks the crumbs rather than pooling. Set the mould on a rimmed tray in case it weeps, and cover the top with buttered paper or foil to stop the exposed pasta drying out.
- Turning outRest it 10 minutes off the heat before inverting, or it will slump. Run a knife round the rim first, invert onto a warm dish, and lift the mould straight up.
- "A sauce"The original does not say which. A plain tomato sauce, or a veloute made from the chicken stock, would both suit. Serve it round the base, not poured over, so the pasta case stays intact. Serves about four as a main dish.
Timballi of this kind — pasta or pastry moulds enclosing meat, offal, eggs and mushrooms — were a fixture of grand Italian cookery from the eighteenth century onward, descendants of the older baked pie in which the crust was as much a container as a food. Dishes tagged alla pontificia or "à la Pontiffe" are traditionally taken to allude to the papal household in Rome, though the attribution is customary rather than documented, and such names generally signalled richness and an aristocratic table rather than a fixed set of ingredients. The recipe's briskness is notable: the writer notes what the dish contains and assumes a cook who already knows how to line a mould.