Hot Macaroni Salad: or, Hold the baloney

Happy leftovers weekend to all who celebrate!

Hot Pasta Salad 8 oz elbow or shell macaroni, cooked in salted water 3 tbsp finely chopped onion ¼ cup oil or drippings 1 tbsp flour 1 tsp salt ½ tsp dry mustard 1 cup water ¼ cup vinegar 1 egg ½ pound fully-cooked sausage (summer sausage, salami, or something like it), sliced and cut into bite-size pieces Cook the sausage until crisp to render out the excess grease. This can be done on the stovetop or by baking them. (You can also do this ahead of time and refrigerate.) Blot with paper towels and set aside. Cook the onion in the drippings until lightly browned. Stir in the flour, salt, and dry mustard. Cook until it stops bubbling. Then pour in the water and vinegar. Add the sausage and stir constantly until the mixture thickens a little bit. Lower heat to a slow simmer and cook 5 minutes. Crack the egg into a medium-sized bowl and start whisking it while you slowly spoon in about one third of the sauce in the frying pan. Then pour it back into the pan and cook for two minutes. Add the pasta, mix well, and serve. Source: Unidentified magazine or pamphlet clipping, probably 1952-1953 Notebook of Hannah Dannehy O'Neil

For those who celebrate Thanksgiving in the US,* today is the day we barely fall out of bed and then start the day by microwaving all the rich, buttery things from yesterday. (As a regional variant, some people forgo the dinner leftovers in favor of the pies that no one put away the night before.) I really don't understand how the Black Friday stampedes became a thing in the mid-2010s. If you do Thanksgiving right, you should be too stupefied to move the next day, much less have a parking lot riot over discounted TVs.

Unfortunately, our Thanksgiving got cancelled at the last minute because a lot of people got sick. ('Tis the merry season, isn't it?) I somehow evaded whatever's going around, but was left with the dreadful prospect of Thanksgiving without leftovers. I like Thanksgiving food enough on the day of, but I really love the week after. It is utter bliss to simply reheat lovingly cooked carbs while the stove stays cold. But this year, I had to make my own damn leftovers.

This brings us to today's recipe, which comes from my great-grandmother's binder. I think she cut it out of the same handout as the domecon chocolate cake. If we put the two side by side, the typography is identical.

I was going to cut the recipe in half, but then I decided that I wanted to have the traditional week-long post-Thanksgiving carb stupor if I had to cook it myself.

I did make one recipe change. The recipe calls for half a pound of bologna meat, which I traded for summer sausage. Yes, I used to eat sliced balogna right out of the package when I was like six or so (I am sure my parents appreciated my cheap taste when they were paying for groceries). But the last time I had any, I was like "What was wrong with me?"

But summer sausage has a lot of fat in it. Those aren't water beads on the sausage skin. That is grease. 

So I decided to cook the sausage just to get rid of the excess. I could have done it on a griddle, but I decided to enjoy the modern life and use a sandwich press.

After about a minute, the sausage was crispy and swimming in its own grease. Speaking of which, I don't understand why sausage is so fatty. They add extra fat to the meat in the factory, and then it seems like the first step in most recipes is "Cook sausage to remove excess fat" or "prick sausage skins so the fat can come out."

Now that we were finished with that detour, the recipe starts with three tablespoons of "grated onions" and a lot of grease. I figured that the extra fat is either supposed to add flavor or bond with the flour to make the gravy. I also underestimated just how much drippings go into this recipe until the onions started swimming in it. 

We are next directed to add the flour and cook "until bubbly." That didn't make sense until I saw it happen.

I dumped in the water and vinegar at their appointed moment, and thought the salad was ruined. This was the runniest, soupiest mess I've put on the stove in a long time. It eventually thickened, but not before I had convinced myself that the salad was only fit for the local wildlife.

I decided to add the sausage to our simmering mess. It had gotten hard and leathery as it cooled. In theory, it would reconstitute in the water and perhaps release some of its salt into the rest of the salad.

Lastly, we are directed to stir in an egg. At first, I was going to temper it like a good person would. Then I decided that if that step was superfluous in the hot potato salad, then clearly I was overthinking it. The directions simply say to "add egg and cook 2 minutes," so that's what I did. The egg got a little scrambled, but I decided I could live with it this time.

And lastly, it was time to add the macaroni and call it a salad! As a reminder, this contains 3 tablespoons of chopped onions and no other vegetable.

Definitely try the sweet potato boulettes.

If you like mustard, this is the pasta salad for you. It's basically noodles in mustard sauce. It's just thick enough to stick to the noodles without being too heavy. The worst part of this was the damned sausage (which was also the only reason this recipe took more than 15 minutes). But this recipe has potential. I already have plans to try it again with mushrooms.

*Canada celebrates Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October. ↪