Daily Life in the Past: Pasta in America

I have been buying homemade-style pasta from local pasta makers for a while. Yesterday I cooked some for a meal and got to wondering about when it would have become common for the folks in my tree to begin eating it. That’s such a broad question – I had folks flung all over – that when I began trying to answer the question, I narrowed it down to when it became commonplace in the States. Sifting through search results, I read this article, The History of Pasta. Among other things, it states:

As other pasta factories sprouted up, the cost of pasta became more affordable. By the time of the Civil War (1861 to 1865), even the working classes could afford a pasta dinner. Cookbooks of the period indicate that the common way to prepare pasta was still baked with cheese and cream.

• In the mid-1880s, according to food historian Karen Hess, cookbooks published as far west as Kansas included recipes for macaroni, some involving a tomato and meat sauce.

Now, I am not a food historian, nor an expert on the history of food. I write articles about the history of vegetables and herbs, but I am well-aware that’s not the same thing. So I am not completely sure how accurate this article and others I have read in my background research are. But one thing I can say for sure is that as a social historian, I find the best way to find out about the past is to go to sources from it. So I cracked open my copy of The “Sunlight” Almanac for 1896: A Home Treasury of Information for the Use of All Members of a Household (New York: Lever Brothers, Limited, 1896), and turned to the recipe subsection of the “Home Management” section. The pasta dish I found was macaroni and cheese, or as the almanac’s unnamed author(s) called it, “Macaroni Cheese.” The most interesting thing, to me, is that it is categorized in the “Sweets” portion, as is the recipe for an omelet that immediately follows it; the two recipes are stuck in amongst fruit desserts, “casserole of rice,” cheese straws, and similar recipes. The recipe is written in the paragraph style that was common of the time period:

Macaroni Cheese.

Required–1/4 lb. macaroni, 3 oz. cheese, 1 oz. butter, a cupful of bread-crumbs, cayenne and salt.

Break the macaroni into small pieces, boil in water till tender, then strain. Melt the cheese and butter together. Butter a dish, cover with crumbs, put in the macaroni with a good seasoning, pour over the melted cheese and butter, then a layer of crumbs and some small pieces of butter on the top, and bake in a hot oven till brown. (p. 258)

Earlier this year I had macaroni and cheese at a pretty upscale restaurant, and their preparation appeared to be pretty much the same as this recipe from over a century ago, minus the need to break the macaroni into small pieces before cooking.

The question, as always, is – this recipe was available to my American folks, but did they actually use it? As social historians, we can say what is likely or possible, but without something specific tying a particular activity to our research subject, we cannot state with certainty that it actually occurred. My great-grandmother, a new mother in 1896, may have made macaroni and cheese as a sweet treat for her family. Or maybe she didn’t.