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Roast with Spaghetti
2 tablespoonfuls flour 3 lbs. sirloin steak 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 large onion 1/4 lb. bacon Salt and pepper to taste 1/2 cupful water 1/2 can tomatoes 1 cupful cooked peas 1 cupful cooked spaghetti 1 cupful cooked mushrooms 8 stuffed olives Melt Crisco and make very hot in roasting pan, lay in steak, season with salt and pepper, cover with layer of sliced onion, layer of bacon, add water, cover, and cook in moderate oven about three hours. Have ready peas, mushrooms, and spaghetti. Place meat on hot platter. Add juice of tomatoes to gravy, and flour moistened with a little cold water, peas and mushrooms, and when hot pour round meat. Spread spaghetti on top and decorate with olives.
This is a covered pot roast dressed up with a garnish of spaghetti, peas and olives. The only real difficulty is the cut of meat, which the original names as steak but treats as a braising joint.
- The cut is the hingeThree hours in a covered pan is braising, not roasting, and a modern sirloin steak — lean and already tender — will be dry and stringy long before then. A 3 lb boneless chuck roast or top blade behaves the way the writer expected the meat to behave; if you insist on sirloin, cut the time to well under an hour and accept that it will be sliced rare.
- Moderate oven350F. With the pan covered and only half a cup of water, check at the two-hour mark and add liquid if the bottom is close to dry.
- CriscoIntroduced as an all-vegetable shortening a few years before this book, and reformulated since. Any neutral oil, or the fat rendered from the bacon, does the same job here.
- Half a can of tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the period came in more than one size, commonly around a pint or around a quart, so half a can is somewhere between a cup and a pint. The recipe wants only the juice in the gravy — drain the tomatoes and keep the solids for another use, or add them if you want a heavier sauce.
- Sear properly"Melt Crisco and make very hot" reads as a browning step, and browning is the difference between a brown gravy and a grey one. The recipe does not say to turn the meat before the onion and bacon go on, but colour on both faces will do no harm.
- ThickeningTwo tablespoons of flour slaked in cold water will thicken the pan juices lightly. Whisk it in off the boil, then simmer a couple of minutes to cook out the raw taste before the peas and mushrooms go in.
- The garnishPeas, mushrooms and spaghetti are all cooked separately and are only warmed through in the sauce — a cup of each is a modest amount, about 2 oz dry spaghetti. Stuffed olives of the period were usually green olives with pimiento, which is what supplies the colour.
- YieldSix servings, with the spaghetti and vegetables standing in for a starch and a side.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco after its launch in 1911, and the shortening's appearance in the first line of nearly every recipe is the point of the book rather than a cook's preference. The dish itself shows how spaghetti was handled in mainstream American cooking of the 1910s: not as a course in its own right but as a garnish laid over a roast, alongside peas, mushrooms and stuffed olives, in the same decorative spirit that put a pastry border round a fricassee. Canned tomatoes, canned peas and bottled olives were all cheap and reliable by then, and the recipe is really a demonstration of how to make a plain braise look like a company dinner using the store cupboard.