Bread is generally called "the staff of life," but in Italy macaroni is the staff of life, and it has a much better title to this designation than bread because it contains so much more of the body-building gluten.
"Gluten is to wheat what lean is to meat," as Charles Cristodoro has tersely put it. "When you think," he writes, "of macaroni flour, it is like going to the butcher and buying a roast and getting less bone, less gristle, and less fat, but about twice as much lean for the money. A butcher who would give his customers twice as much lean meat as another butcher would get all the trade in the neighborhood."
In other words, macaroni is both bread and meat. It is not merely a side-dish, as many American and English housewives fancy, but a complete meal in itself, although, owing to the mildness of its Flavor, it is generally relished more when cooked with tomatoes, or a little chopped meat, or, better still, some cheese or butter or both, because, like bread, macaroni is deficient in fat, some of which it needs to make a dish well balanced as to nutritive ingredients.
For lunch there is perhaps nothing quite so desirable as a dish of macaroni thus prepared. At present it is difficult to get such a dish properly cooked, except in our Italian and French restaurants. But I believe the time will come when every American and English business man and woman will have a chance to eat an appetizing and easily digestible lunch in a macaroni cook-shop.
This point seems of such great importance that I shall emphasize it by citing Sir Henry Thompson's advice.
"Weight for weight, macaroni may be regarded as not less valuable for flesh-making purposes, in the animal economy, than beef and mutton. Most people can digest it more easily and rapidly than meat; it offers, therefore, an admirable substitute for meat, particularly for lunch or midday meals, among those whose employments demand continuous attention during the whole of a long afternoon. To dine, or eat a heavy meal in the middle of the day is, for busy men, a great mistake: one nevertheless which is extremely common, and productive of great discomfort, to say the least."
Macaroni might, this eminent dietician suggests, be prepared at the restaurants "as a staple dish, in two or three forms, since it sustains the power without taxing too much the digestion, or rendering the individual heavy, sleepy, and incompetent afterwards."