The wartime and patriotic messages aside, we of course, will focus on the food itself and what it meant in cookery books slightly earlier in the century. The Italian import was known in England much earlier and I will run through a few mentions of it in the Notes. However, I have not found a lot of actual recipes until the mid-eighteenth century. Vincent La Chappelle, an important culinary author and a cook to continental and British nobility includes “A Chicken Pye with Italian Mascaroni” in Volume Two of The Modern Cook (1733.) I wanted to focus on simpler recipes, so I went with two from later in the century. John Thacker, cook to the Dean of Durham Cathedral, has a recipe for a kind of sweet pudding under the heading “To make Mackroney for present Use” or more basically just “Macaroni.” This comes from his 1758 The Art of Cookery (not to be confused with Hannah Glasses similarly titled book from a few years earlier.) In 1769, Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper includes instructions “To Dress Macaroni with Permasent Cheese,” which is almost as simple as it sounds.
I will present recipes for Thacker’s and Raffald’s different versions of eighteenth-century macaroni in turn and then provide some notes on my adaptations as well as a little history of “macaroni” in English print.
Recipes
“To Make Mackroney for Present Use” or “Macaroni.”
Ingredients
- 200 g (about 1 ¼ cups) flour, more for dusting
- 2 eggs
- 568 ml (1 Imperial pint, or about 2 1/3 US cups) milk
- 568 ml (1 Imperial pint, or about 2 1/3 US cups) whipping cream
- 1 tbsp sugar (more to taste)
- ½ tsp cinnamon
- Orange pieces (bitter variety if available and desired) to serve.
Instructions
Pasta
Begin your pasta by making a mound of flour on a large, clean work surface. (See Notes.)
Make a well in the centre of your mound and break your eggs into it.
With a fork, first break up your eggs and beat them slightly. Then moving in circles, incorporate the flour a little at a time.
Mixing with the fork and using it to scrape up the flour and egg from the surface, work until you have a loose dough.
Switching to your hands, continue to work until the dough is combined and somewhat smooth.
Ideally for modern pasta, you knead the dough for 30 minutes at this point, especially if you are not using a pasta machine. I will let you decide how much time and energy you have for kneading. You want a silky, smooth dough in the end.
Cover and allow to rest for 30 minutes.
Cut pasta in half and keep one half covered
Roll out the other half into a sheet as thin and square as possible with a rolling pin.
Dust the top lightly with flour.
Beginning at the side closest to you, make a fold about 4 cm (1 1/2 inches) in. Continue to fold over your sheet at that interval until you have a flat roll.
With a very sharp knife cut through the long sides of your roll, leaving stacked strips of 4cm pasta.
Slice across the roll as finely as you can or have patience for. You should be left with little stacks of 4cm noodles.
The dusted flour should help these come apart but make sure each noodle is separated and then dust again with a little flour. (See Notes.)
Repeat with the other half of the dough. Set aside.
Sweet Cream Sauce
In a large saucepan, over medium heat, bring milk and cream just to a boil.
Add your pasta noodles and turn up the heat to medium high.
Bring to a low boil and cook, stirring regularly to prevent sticking and over-boiling.
Cook to thicken your sauce until it will coat the back of a spoon and a line traced with your finger will not run. This will take about 7-8 minutes.
Stir in your sugar and cinnamon.
Serve hot with orange segments.
“To Dress Macaroni with Permasent Cheese”
Ingredients
- 200g (about 1 ¼ cups) flour
- 2 eggs
- 284ml (about 1 ¼ cups) cream
- 50g (about 2 heaping tbsp) butter, in two lumps.
- 10g flour
- 45g Parmesan cheese, in shavings made with a vegetable peeler
Instructions
Make your pasta as per the first “Macaroni” recipe. Proceed until you are finished the step of rolling out your dough. (See Notes.)
Set a large pot of water to boil.
Cut your sheet into equal 5cm (2 inch) squares.
Using a wooden dowel – the handle of a wooden spoon works – place one of the pasta squares under the dowel on a clean work surface with two corners pointing down the length.
With one finger push the top free corner of pasta over the dowel. Roll the dowel slightly until the corner rolls over the rest of the pasta.
Lift the dowel and grab the pasta rolled around it. Use your thumb to push together the two corners that have been rolled together, sealing them. Slide the little rough tube of pasta you have formed off the dowel. (See Notes.)
Continue with all the squares you have made and then repeat with the other half of your pasta that was set aside. It is okay to leave the formed macaroni out and let them dry a bit while you make the others.
Boil all your macaroni until tender, about 4 minutes. Drain and set aside.
In a large frying pan, begin heating your cream over medium high heat, stirring occasionally and watching closely.
Roll the two lumps of butter in flour and add them to the heating cream. Once they have melted, stir to distribute.
Just before the cream boils, add your pasta and turn the heat up to high.
Preheat broiler in oven.
Once it has reached a boil, allow to cook for 5 minutes.
Pour into an oven-proof bowl or platter and lay over the shavings of parmesan.
Broil until the cheese is melted, about a minute.
Serve immediately.
Historical Notes
While these are some of the earliest recipes I found for macaroni, the pasta was known to a fairly broad base of English readers much earlier. A kind of early dictionary - John Florio’s A World of Words from 1598 – included this definition: “Maccaroni, a kinde of paste meate boiled in broth, and drest with butter, cheese, and spice.” Later definitions would give some better ideas of the shape that English cooks were using in the period. An English Dictionary by Elisha Coles (1677) says “Maccaroni … lumps of boild paste, served up in butter and strew'd with spice and grated cheese.” In The Ladies Dictionary (1694) there is this appetising definition: “the Italian Macaroni, lumps or gobbers of boiled paste, served up in butter, and strewed over with Spice, and grated cheese; a common dish in Italy.” “Gobber” was probably another spelling of gobbet, which just means a small piece or lump, but we can glean from these definitions, as well as Thacker’s recipe, that macaroni was usually a short pasta in England.
Macaroni makes appearances in some cultural contexts during the general period as well. Sir Hugh Plat was a famous writer, most well-known for his works on agriculture, though he was given credit by some for one of Hannah Woolley’s cookery books. In a pamphlet called “Certaine philosophical preparations of foode and beverage for sea-men, in their long voyages” (1607), he recommends “first for Foode. A cheape, fresh and lasting victuall, called by the name of Macaroni amongst the Italians.” Plat claims to have provided Sir Francis Drake, of global circumnavigation fame, with macaroni for one of his voyages.
Also, well-before “macaroni” was a fancy person in the eighteenth century, it was a fancy or at least exotic food in English popular culture. Playwright Ben Jonson penned a comedy called Cynthia's Revels, or The Fountain of Self-Love; it was performed first in 1600. In it, Cupid and Mercury have a conversation about another character who affects many extravagant guises; Mercury says of his servant: “He doth learne to make strange sauces, to eat aenchovies, maccaroni, bovoli [snails], fagioli [beans], and caviar.” Written by a less famous author but well-received in its time was Thomas Duffet’s The Amorous Old-Woman: or, 'Tis Well if it Take.” Set in Italy, one of the principal characters, a senator, is chiding his servant for not being happy with the amount of meat served at a banquet. He first asks: “You think y'are in England to clog your stomach with Buttock Beef.” The servant remains unsatisfied and his master continues: “Be content Rascal, thou shall surfeit [ be overly filled] on Macharoni, and Vermicelli.” The poor retainer, surely standing in for the English audience, responds; “A Pox on your Minestras [an Italian, usually vegetable, soup], give me Beef.
Notes on Adaptation
The period recipe does give a fairly specific method for making 1 ½ inch noodles. However, it does say to separate out the noodles – “let it be parted Bit from Bit” as they are placed in the pot. The method of making a flat roll and cutting it was my own idea (after some trial and error) designed to separate them earlier in the process. A pasta machine with an angel hair attachment would, of course, make the whole process easier and your noodles finer.
The Seville oranges called for are bitter but I used canned mandarins because that is what I had on hand. However, a little lemon juice would have been a nice counter to the sweet, or you could use something like grapefruit segments. Overall, the taste is good: cream, sugar and cinnamon with unsalted pasta is a lot like many basic modern desserts. The texture is a little different; I think I would like the noodles a little thinner than I cut them but that would have required a lot more patience than I had at the time.
For Elizabeth Raffald’s Parmesan-dressed macaroni, I doubled the quantities as the four ounces she calls for is not a whole lot of pasta. A gill (for the cream) is a half cup in Imperial measurements, and I adapted that but needed to do educated guesses for the size of the lumps of butter and the cheese.
The short hollow pasta that is macaroni in a lot of the English-speaking world is not necessarily what “maccheroni” was or is in Italy. Today it can be a variety of shapes, both long and short. However, from my reading, it seemed to be short in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England but I decided to make something beyond the “lumps” mentioned in the definitions. Looking for something that could be done with period tools – a wooden spoon –, I made my macaroni like garganelli without the ridges or small paccheri.
This tastes great; a slightly-thickened cream and butter sauce seasoned from atop with Parmesan is unsurprisingly savoury. An Italian purist would cook the beautiful pasta less and you could add the Parmesan to the sauce to incorporate it better but this is really nice macaroni cheese and better than KD, depending on where you’re from.
Next week, I will probably make something whose name comes from the same source as macaroni but is quite different – macarons.
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