Gilded Age Macaroni and Servers

When people hear the word, “Macaroni,” most people think, “and cheese!” But during the Gilded Age, macaroni (in a variety of forms) was a very popular side dish, even at formal dinners. Numerous recipes for macaroni can be found in cookbooks of the late-19th century. To demonstrate just how popular macaroni was, take a look at these large gilded, macaroni servers from the time period. Only the most popular of foods had utensils designed for serving and eating them at the time. These two are excellent examples. The following article is how macaroni got its name.
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Macaroni is a favorite dish with many people, and its manufacture an important industry in many Italian and French cities. It is a wheaten paste, prepared in the form of hollow tubes of different diameters, and is served at dinners in various styles for entrees or desserts. It is said to have had its birth and christening in Sicily in this way:

Once upon a time a wealthy noble of Palermo owned a cook not only accomplished beyond compare in the practice of his profession, but gifted by nature with an inventive genius. One day, in a rapture of culinary composition, this great artist devised the farinaceous tubes which all love so well, and the succulent accessories of rich sauce and grated parmesan, familiar to those who have partaken of “macaroni alsogo” in South Italy. 

Having filled a mighty china bowl with this delicious compound, he set it be fore his Lord— a gourmand of the first order — and stood by, in deferential attitude, to watch the effect of his experiment. The first mouthful elicited the ejaculation, “Cari,” idiomatically equivalent to “excellent” in English, from the illustrious epicure. 

After swallowing a second modicum he exclaimed “Ma cari,” or, “Excellent indeed.” Presently, as the flavor of the toothsome mess grew upon him, his enthusiasm rose to even higher flights, and he cried out, in a voice tremulous with joyful emotion, “Ma, caroni!— Indeed, most supremely, sublimely, superlatively excellent!” 

In paying this verbal tribute to the merits of his cook’s discovery he unwittingly bestowed a name upon that admirable preparation which has stuck to it ever since.—Golden Argosy, 1888

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