Culinary jottings

whichever you use should be boiling : parboil the paste in boiling water for five minutes to clean it, drain it carefully, and turn it into the stock or milk also boiling as the case may be to finish cooking. The accepted form of serving maccaroni with Englishmen is either swimming in white sauce round a boiled fowl, or turkey, or in a pie-dish "au gratin" In the former fashion it is generally presented in such a flabby, tasteless manner, that the general unpopularity of Italian pastes may be easily accounted for. The "au gratin" is better understood perhaps, but even there, there is room for improvement. " Maccaroni au gratin ;" — First boil the maccaroni as I have laid down, if in milk or stock, so much the better. Well butter a pie-dish, arrange the maccaroni therein neatly, give it a dusting with black pepper and salt, pour round it a large cupful of good sauce blonde (q. v., page 82) in which you have mixed two ounces of grated cheese : let this run well in amongst the bed of maccaroni, and shake over the surface a liberal coating of grated cheese. Make this thoroughly hot, in the oven, brown the surface of the cheese by passing a hot iron about half an inch above it, and send it up. Maccaroni " au gratin' should be nice and moist : you can use cream instead of sauce blonde if you like, and tomato puree may be introduced in its composition. A little minced fish such as herring, prawns, lobster, or anchovy, may be dotted about amongst the maccaroni, and with minced ham and chicken, or tongue and chicken, you can make a capital home-dinner entree, following in other respects the ordinary recipe. "Maccaroni à l'Italienne" will be found in Chapter XIX, (page 189). "Maccaroni à la Milanaise," another excellent method. may be described as follows : — Boil two ounces of maccaroni, and keep it hot in its ovm pan after draining. Make a breakfast-cupful of good chicken broth flavoured with an onion, sweet herbs, and black pepper corns. With that make a nice "velouté au fromage" in this way ; — Melt an ounce of butter in a sauce-pan, stir into it a dessert-spoonful of flour, mix them to a paste, and by degrees pour in the hot chicken broth ; as this is thickening, add to it two ounces of grated cheese, or Parmesan from the bottle, a tea-spoonful of powdered mustard, salt, and " spiced pepper," at discretion ; continue to stir the sauce until it reaches a creamy thickness, when you can finish it off the fire by a table-spoonful of cream, or the yolks of two raw eggs beaten separately. Now, stir the sauce into the hot boiled maccaroni, and serve immediately.