Boil ½ pound of spaghetti until tender. Drain. Heat 1 tablespoonful of butter, stir in ½ pound of grated cheese, salt and pepper. Then add 1 cup of milk; let boil and pour over the spaghetti. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and grated cheese and let bake in the oven until done. Serve hot.
February 23 — No. 23
Italian
A baked spaghetti-and-cheese dish of the plainest sort, written for cooks who already knew what a cheese sauce should look like. The instructions leave out the two things that decide whether it works: how long to boil the pasta, and how hot the oven should be.
- Keep the sauce below a boilButter, grated cheese and milk with no flour to bind them will separate if the mixture is actually boiled as written — the cheese seizes into strings and weeps fat. Melt the cheese into warm milk off direct high heat, or thicken the milk with a teaspoon of flour first, and the sauce will stay smooth through baking.
- Boil the spaghetti shortPeriod cookbooks commonly boiled macaroni and spaghetti far longer than we do, often twenty minutes or more, and here the pasta then goes into a hot oven and keeps cooking. Drain it two or three minutes shy of al bedente.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither. Bake at 350–375°F for 20–25 minutes, until the top is browned and the edges bubble.
- The cheese quantityHalf a pound of grated cheese to half a pound of dry spaghetti is a very high ratio by modern habit, and "grated cheese" in recipes of this kind usually meant a firm dry cheese — Parmesan, or a hard American factory cheese. A blend of about two thirds sharp cheddar to one third Parmesan melts well and stays close to that character.
- SaltSalt is called for twice, and hard grating cheese is already salty. Salt the pasta water, then taste the finished sauce before adding more.
- YieldHalf a pound of pasta with this much cheese serves three as a main dish, four as a side.
- DishA shallow gratin dish or 8-inch square baker gives more browned surface than a deep casserole.
Books of "dishes of all nations" were a small publishing genre around the turn of the twentieth century, offering American households a nominal tour of Europe through one recipe a day — hence a February that runs Dutch, Italian, Russian on consecutive pages. What is labelled Italian here is really the Anglo-American macaroni-and-cheese tradition, which reached the United States well before large-scale Italian immigration did, transferred onto spaghetti as the newer familiar shape. Dry pasta, both imported and domestically manufactured, was readily bought in American groceries by the end of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period commonly treated it as a cheese vehicle rather than a partner to tomato or oil; tomato sauce becomes usual in mainstream American spaghetti recipes largely in the decades that follow. The absence of garlic, herbs and olive oil is the clearest sign of how the dish was imagined — Italian in name, Anglo-American in technique.