Hot Macaroni Salad Revisited: Not perfect, but we haven't seen the last of it

When last we tried the hot macaroni salad from my great-grandmother's book, it was really good except for the meat. The original recipe called for a pound of balogna meat, which made me feel icky. We therefore replaced it with summer sausage, which seemed nice in theory but wasn't very good. The rest of the salad was all right, so we decided come back and try it again.

Hot Pasta Salad ½ cup water 1 tbsp flour 1 tsp salt ½ tsp dry mustard 1 egg ¼ cup vinegar 1 pound sliced mushrooms 3 tbsp finely chopped onion ¼ cup oil or bacon drippings 8 oz elbow or shell macaroni, cooked in salted water Whisk together the water, flour, salt, mustard, egg, and vinegar; set aside. In a large frying pan, cook the mushrooms and onion in the bacon drippings. Turn off heat, and stir in the flour mixture. Heat to a slow simmer, stirring constantly, and cook 5 minutes. Add the pasta, mix well, and serve. Adapted from an unidentified magazine or pamphlet clipping, probably 1952-1953 Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

Today, we are replacing the meat with... these!

I reduced the water in the sauce to make up for the juice that came out of the mushrooms. (If I'm being honest about how much I overthink things, I cooked a batch of mushrooms for unrelated purposes, then got out a measuring cup and a strainer.)

Since I didn't have to fuss with a sandwich press full of meat this time, I only needed to dump the noodles into everything else and stir for a few seconds.

This recipe's flavor almost works, but it doesn't. You would have to take out the mustard from the original recipe and put in something else. (Or who knows, maybe mustard-tinged pasta is really good with ham next time we have any.) Aside from the mustard, this is simply noodles and mushrooms, so the mustard is the only thing that doesn't quite fit.

Before reheating the leftovers, I tried a few of the noodles and they were really good cold. The mustard coating was unexpectedly perfect. (The cold mushrooms were terrible, but we'll set that aside.) So I'm going to say this is like the hot potato salad: better if you cross the word "hot" off the recipe title. The refrigerator improves it. It's probably really nice with some chopped bell peppers and fresh onions in it.

In general, this recipe tasted outdated in a very midcentury-specific kind of way. It's tempting to simply say that our foods have changed over the decades. And while that is true, I think this has a more specific cause: we don't smoke nearly as much as we used to. 

I don't have official stats on this so I could be wrong, but it seems like we hit peak smoking in the middle of the 20th century before everyone got fed up with smelling like a fermented bowling alley in the 1990s. I think that in our current happy era of restaurants where we can breathe the free air, we forget just how awful and omnipresent the smell used to be. Indoor stadiums used to have a literal tobacco fog during games.

As for how cigarettes explain this recipe: we all know that smoking dulls your taste. But I think that in addition to that, foods taste different when pre-seasoned with airborne tar.* And I feel that this is an underestimated part of why midcentury food tastes so bizarre now that we have cleaner lungs. The flavors are incomplete without an ashtray at the table. This salad's hot mustard noodles and crispy balogna slices probably made more sense under those cough-inducing conditions. But since I'm not about to take up smoking that I may fully appreciate the flavors of yore, I'll just serve this pasta chilled instead. 

 

 

 

*When I said this in a recent post, Lace Maker commented that mayonnaise is apparently very good for cleaning away cigarette tar. Which leads me to a new theory: are all those midcentury mayonnaise-heavy recipes an attempt to de-tar ones taste buds enough to taste the salad?  ↪