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Spaghetti or Macaroni-Italian Style
1 Pound Spaghetti or Macaroni 2 Cloves Garlic 1/2 Cupful Snowdrift 1 Can Tomato Paste Boiling Water Grated Parmesan or American Cheese Put the spaghetti or macaroni on to cook in boiling, salted water, as usual. Then melt the Snowdrift in a frying-pan, add the garlic, crushed fine, and fry it until yellowed. Turn in the tomato paste, adding an equal amount of boiling water, and simmer the mixture until thick.
Then season it with salt and pepper, add the spaghetti or macaroni, which should be well drained, and rinse with cold water.
Allow it to re-heat and serve it, sprinkled thickly with the cheese. This is sufficiently substantial for the main dish at luncheon or supper.
A brand-book version of pasta al pomodoro, written for a cook who had never met it before. Two instructions need rethinking and the fat needs replacing.
- Snowdrift is shorteningSnowdrift was a canned cottonseed-oil shortening, the house product this book was written to sell. Half a cupful of neutral solid fat in a tomato sauce is more than the dish needs; use 3-4 tablespoons of olive oil or butter instead.
- Skip the cold rinseRinsing drained pasta in cold water strips the surface starch that helps sauce cling, and it chills the pasta so it must be reheated. Drain it and move it straight into the pan, saving a little cooking water to loosen the sauce.
- Do not let the garlic colour past pale gold"Fry it until yellowed" is the limit, not the target. Crushed garlic in hot fat turns bitter within seconds of browning; keep the heat moderate and add the tomato paste as soon as it smells sweet.
- Tomato paste quantity"1 can" is unspecified; a small can, on the order of 6 ounces, is the likeliest reading. With an equal volume of boiling water that yields only about 1 1/3 cups of sauce, thin coverage for a full pound of pasta; a 6-oz can plus 1 to 1 1/2 cups water, simmered down, is closer to workable.
- Simmer means simmerTomato paste diluted with water tastes raw and tinny until it has cooked. Give it 10-15 minutes over low heat, stirring, until it darkens and coats a spoon.
- "American cheese"Here this means a domestic hard grating cheese standing in for Parmesan, not the processed slices the phrase now suggests. Use Parmesan, Grana Padano or a dry aged cheddar.
- YieldA pound of dry pasta with this much sauce serves four as the light main course the recipe describes, or six as a first course.
A New Snowdrift Cook Book is a manufacturer's pamphlet: Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and books like this existed to put the tin into American kitchens by attaching it to as many dishes as possible. That is why a garlic-and-tomato sauce, which in an Italian household would be built on olive oil, is here begun by melting half a cup of vegetable shortening. The recipe also assumes that canned tomato paste and factory-made dry spaghetti were ordinary American grocery items, so that "Italian style" could be offered to readers for whom the dish was still a novelty. The reassurance at the end — that meatless pasta is "sufficiently substantial for the main dish" — suggests how unfamiliar the idea still was to the book's intended audience.