welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
in the old cookbook show today we're
going to do a recipe
that appears in dozens
of my cookbooks from the early 1800s
until about mid world war one
and we'll get to that
that change later
but in all of these cookbooks
there's a recipe that is generally known
as
genuine italian macaroni
italian macaroni italian macaroni and
the one that we're going to follow most
closely is this cookbook
this is an original from 1883 and this
is a reprint it's always nice to have a
reprint of a lot of these books not that
you want to abuse a book but if you're
going to be thumbing through a book
looking for recipes a reprint is always
better than an original and this is an
original of the buckeye
buckeye cookery and practical
housekeeping book
sent in by a viewer
whose predecessor was part of bringing
this to life and i thank them very much
for sending this in so the recipe we're
going to do out of this cookbook is
called again italian macaroni
this is from 1883.
some of these books are from the 1820s
this one is from just around world war
one
and before you go full vincenzo's plate
on me
it's not really italian the dish really
isn't italian
it is an american interpretation
of italian food
and it's an american interpretation it
could even be an italian-american
interpretation of
what they sort of remember that they ate
before they immigrated to the united
states but they're making do with what
they found here
and i'm not exactly sure
where this comes from
but all of the recipes are essentially
the same in the way that they're put
together so i'm supposed to start out
with some salt pork for the fat and then
ground beef
uh the variation within these recipes
is
um
bacon or salt pork to start with and
sometimes it's ground beef sometimes
it's ground pork the earlier you go in
the recipe books
it asks for
left over beef from the sunday roast
so whatever was left over maybe on
wednesday or thursday you chop it up
real fine and you put it into this dish
a way to use leftovers at the end of
their life
now
i'm gonna brown this ground beef
the buckeye cookery book
talks about
putting the beef
and these onions
in a kettle
putting the lid on the kettle
um
dutch oven we'd call it today a dutch
oven but then it would have been called
a kettle
and putting it on the back
burner
of your wood stove and just letting it
go all day
and letting it brown
and and cook slowly over an even heat
from your wood stove all day
i don't have a wood stove um julie's
gonna be home in a little while and i
don't have all day to wait to make
supper so i'm just gonna brown it off
quickly
okay that's looking pretty good so next
in our tomatoes
so pretty much all of the recipes ask
for canned or stewed tomatoes these are
our home canned tomatoes from our own
garden
and so when
you see a recipe from this time period
asking for canned tomatoes they're not
necessarily asking for
you know a can tin can of tomatoes
that you would go to the grocery store
today and buy
it would be home canned tomatoes and a
lot of them ask for stewed tomatoes so
these are stewed tomatoes
and so you know we get the tomatoes
bring them in from the garden
peel them put them in a pot with some
onion celery and some spices stew them
together and then put them into the jars
so there's there's a whole lot more
flavor
in a stewed tomato than in just a plain
canned tomato
and
you just saw me put some pepper in
that's really the only spice that uh
that is asked for some of the recipes
ask for a little bit of garlic um you
know half a clove of garlic that sort of
thing there really isn't a lot of
spicing going on beyond just the flavors
of the tomato the beef the pork the
onion
and as much as i just said that this was
pretty much an american recipe because
it appears in all of these
it also appears in a lot of english
cookbooks in the same time period and so
this is the scottish women's rural
institute cookery book
and it appears in even the earliest ones
of this book that i have and through
later books as well
i mean this was in the 1800s a very
popular recipe
so i'm going to let this cook down says
to let it go for two hours
i've got about an hour and a half and
we'll let this cook
and come together
okay so sauce is looking good salted
water just about up to a boil
one of the other variations that i
forgot to mention that you see in a lot
of these books
is the addition of a can of mushrooms
the buckeye cookery book doesn't call
for any mushrooms
the tennessee cookbook just says chopped
mushrooms doesn't call for canned
mushrooms so i assume that they meant
if you can get them fresh use them fresh
all of the other cookbooks call it
specifically canned mushrooms
which is not that strange because even
in my lifetime
fresh mushrooms were difficult to get
when i was a little kid and my mom
always used canned mushrooms because you
could always have them fresh mushrooms
were something that you know you found
at the grocery store sometimes but not
always now
this is called italian macaroni
and i have
macaroni so this is this is full-length
macaroni
i get this from
a store a west indian store
it's from trinidad so it is macaroni it
is full-length
macaroni is a weird word so let's talk
about what a weird word macaroni is in
this time period and earlier
macaroni was often used as a generic
word that just meant pasta
and you can see that in some of these
cookbooks
the recipe will be called macaroni with
and then in the recipe it will call out
for spaghetti
or you know rotini or penne or something
like that
macaroni just meant pasta it could have
been used interchangeably for any shape
of pasta
in some instances though it's
specifically called for macaroni and
what they're asking for is this long
straight tubes of macaroni which is what
i have here
this cookbook that we're working from
today
doesn't really say it just says take a
quantity of macaroni desired and boil in
water for 20 minutes
often
these early cookery books would ask you
to either break it up before you cook it
or cook it and then cut it up
into smaller lengths
i always thought that was interesting
turns out
elbow macaroni the macaroni that we all
think of today the little short ones
that are curved
isn't invented until the 1870s
so no one well shouldn't say that okay
wasn't commercially available to buy
until the 1870s i'm sure some pasta
granny
you know in italy somewhere was making
your fashioning tiny little pieces of
elbow macaroni but you couldn't buy it
commercially at a store
so elbow macaroni doesn't show up until
the 1880s which is sort of in fitting
with what's going on here
but
would it have been available in ohio in
the american midwest in this time period
who knows
okay the water's boiling so in goes a
quantity of macaroni
i won't be cooking the pasta the
macaroni um
for
20 or 25 minutes
nine ten minutes is probably more than
enough but i am going to move these
books out of the way um
the next bit
could be really messy and i don't want
to get stuff all over these books now
at the same time as this recipe italian
macaroni
is in this book
or in
in all of these books
there's another recipe that is sort of
running in parallel that we have done
on this channel that shows up in a lot
of cookbooks from the american south and
it is called
southern
spaghetti and
just to be clear to those people who you
know
take exception
when i say southern spaghetti i mean the
southern united states not sicily
and so
southern spaghetti is happening at the
same time in parallel
and it's it's one of those recipes that
is the same thing it's it's a casserole
it's spaghetti it's a meat sauce the
meat sauce is
um
has a little bit wider variety of
flavors and it usually had beans or peas
or something in it like that
and so you can you can look on our
channel and find that and that southern
spaghetti recipe is one that again i
find in
dozens and dozens and dozens
of
cookbooks from the southern united
states in this time period
now
if you're watching closely you'll notice
that i'm cooking macaroni i've made sort
of a meat sauce i'm going to put some
cheese on top it's going to go into a
casserole dish it's going to go in the
oven
and you're probably saying that's just
like johnny marzetti
and you wouldn't be wrong it is just
like johnny marzetti and so
the restaurant
where johnny marzetti comes from
isn't established until the 1890s i
think 1896 or 97 or something like that
and
historians have had a hard time nailing
down when this dish showed up on
their menu
called johnny marzetti or john marzetti
but
this dish
italian macaroni
in cookbooks from like the late 1920s
and onward starts to be called johnny
marzetti
and the italian macaroni name falls by
the wayside the recipe expands a little
bit there are some other flavors put in
but for the most part it is exactly the
same recipe
and depending on what part of
the united states or canada that you
live in it could be called other things
like
american goulash or
here my mother would have called it chop
suey and again those are recipes that
we've done
on the channel as well
so that's the thing about food food is
not static it does not sit still it
moves it changes it morphs
it evolves and so you know a recipe that
i see
from 1820 and then you follow it through
to 1920
the recipe might stay basically the same
but some of the flavors will change
some of the ingredients will change
because the way that people live has
changed and then eventually the name
changes even though it is essentially
the same recipe and so
you can't you can't think of it as
static
i'm
75 years old and i've always lived here
and i don't know what you're talking
about well
no you don't because this is from almost
200 years ago
okay i'm going to say this macaroni is
cooked so
drain it out
and i'll just stick it in this bowl
okay so i need
i need a spoon of course i can't grab
spoon right away
it's just a layered dish at this point
so
in this baking dish
okay layer of macaroni
and a layer of meat sauce
[Music]
and
a layer of cheese
now the cheese is a little bit
interesting i'm using cheddar because
the recipe that i'm working from just
said american cheese
and in this time period it would have
been cheddar american cheese
some of the other recipes
specifically call out cheeses like
amentol
uh one of the recipes
says
grated italian cheese and that's you
know as far as they get they don't
really say which italian cheese
there's so many
um one or two of the recipes do call for
you to make a cheese sauce
almost like
macaroni and cheese
and pour that on so like a bechamel
sauce even
but most of them most of the recipes are
just this you're layering in
grated cheddar cheese
macaroni and the meat sauce
ending up with a layer of cheese on top
and sticking it in the oven okay last
layer of cheese
and into the oven
okay so we can clear these away hi
friends um this was last sunday's recipe
we made frodo biscuits american biscuits
kentucky biscuits whatever all right so
but we have other things to to try out
so these cookbooks go away
so
thanks
i'm guessing forks
these cookbooks come back
always lots going on
um
you think the spoon is the right choice
well i don't know so it's tongue spoon
it's difficult to say i don't get tongs
just in case
so this is
italian macaroni from the 1800s
okay oh yeah it's the package of
macaroni that was
uncut macaroni like long macaroni
so this is
um
let me help you out it shows up in
almost every cookbook that we own
from this time period really yeah
what's the time period again uh this is
this is
early 1800s to the 1880s
even into the 1910s and then
the recipe changes names songs yeah
the recipe changed his name
at some point and becomes
johnny marzetti it becomes
american goulash it becomes
chow mein it's noodles and yeah looks
like noodles meat cheese tomatoes
yeah that's all it is yeah that's right
looks like it still might be hot though
and i mean
it's a great combination
i used our stewed tomatoes because
some of these recipes ask for canned
tomatoes and some of them ask for stewed
tomatoes stewed tomatoes just bring that
extra layer of flavor since there's not
too many flavorings in it other than
pepper
right
um there's no salt in it
no yeah no
you're gonna do with some salt a little
salt i think a little salt would be
helpful i um
would add more vegetables
but you know
oh
and we talked about that
there is a there's a recipe in parallel
called southern spaghetti that's in all
of the southern cookbooks
that has beans and peas and we did that
on the show as well it's essentially the
same sort of thing
but with beans and peas the fun thing
with pasta generally is that you can put
in whatever vegetables you got going
like if you if you've got your garden
and you've got some squash and you've
got you just throw it in just yeah don't
don't think too much about it add what
you like so this was obviously
by the number of cookbooks that it's in
and the fact that the recipe isn't too
different between cookbooks in this time
period was a very
popular dish
i wonder how easy or difficult it was to
get hold of the macaroni because it
would travel well
yeah
right so i have i have some cookbooks
from american pasta manufacturers dried
pasta in this time period
and they were selling the the
full-length macaroni
so it would have been fairly easy to get
um
and then sometime after this it's not
easy to get anymore no well there's
there's the thing so the elbow macaroni
and i said this earlier the elbow
macaroni doesn't appear in the
marketplace for sale commercially made
until 1876. yeah
so by 1890 or 1900 that would have been
available pretty much everywhere as well
anyway enough talking this is a great
dish and it's
it's easy to put together
relatively inexpensive filling put some
beans in it put some other vegetables in
it extend it any way you like i've
already picked out a wine to go with it
okay thank you so thanks for stopping by
see you again soon
you