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Pheasant and Macaroni
This also is a luxurious dish, prevalent in all of the Italian cities. It can be made of any kind of game. Chop the meat of duck or partridges, rabbits or guinea fowl, into dice, using the remains of roast birds, put the bones and trimmings, gravy and filling with water to cover, onion, parsley, a bayleaf and a carrot, and let it cook slowly. To each 1/2 pound of meat add 2 chopped shallots, salt, pepper, nutmeg, a tablespoonful of mushroom catchup and as much sherry, the sauce strained, flour, and butter. Add 6 ounces of macaroni, cooked in stock, put in a dish and bake it.
A leftovers dish written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew how to build a game sauce. The instructions give proportions for meat and macaroni and leave the thickening to your judgement.
- What holds it togetherThe hinge is the stock: bones, trimmings, gravy and stuffing simmered with onion, parsley, bay and carrot, then strained and thickened. Reduce that liquid until it coats a spoon before it meets the meat, or the macaroni will drink it and the dish will bake out dry.
- "Filling"Here this most likely means the stuffing from the roast bird, which goes into the stock pot with the bones for flavour. It is not a separate ingredient to be bought.
- Mushroom catchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not tomato ketchup. Mushroom ketchup is still sold by British grocers; a teaspoon of soy sauce plus a little of the mushroom soaking liquid from dried porcini gives a comparable savoury depth.
- Flour and butter, unmeasuredThe original leaves the amounts to you, and it gives no stock quantity either, since the bones are simply covered with water. For about 1 1/2 cups of strained stock, a roux of 2 tablespoons each butter and flour gives a sauce thick enough to bind without turning pasty.
- Macaroni in stockSix ounces of dry macaroni to half a pound of meat. Boiling it in stock rather than water is the point of the instruction, and it should come out distinctly underdone, since it finishes in the oven.
- OvenNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 375F until the top is browned and the edges bubbling, 20 to 30 minutes; the contents are already cooked, so this is only about colour and setting.
- Game substitutionsThe recipe says any game will do, and means it. Cooked chicken thigh meat works, though it wants more shallot and a firmer hand with the nutmeg to make up for what pheasant or partridge brings on its own.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; half a pound of meat with six ounces of macaroni makes a modest dish, perhaps three as a main course or more in smaller first-course servings.
Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) collected dishes she had eaten abroad and rendered them for American cooks, which explains both the confident claim that this is "prevalent in all of the Italian cities" and the thoroughly English mushroom catchup and sherry in the sauce. What she is describing is close to a baked pasticcio of macaroni with a game ragù — a way of using the picked-over carcasses of roast birds that made sense in any household that regularly served game, and one that in Italy long predates the use of tomato in pasta sauce.