Henry Leone
SPAGHETTI A LA LEONE
Four pounds of upper round, cut thick, and well larded with long thin slices of salt pork and garlic. Brown the beef in large pot with a good-sized piece of butter. When the meat is well browned, add half a dozen medium-sized onions, chopped fine. When onions also are browned, add slowly a glassful of claret, about a tablespoonful at a time, now add a good portion of parsley, a pinch of thyme and about one-quarter pound of fresh Season well with salt, pepper and mushrooms, all chopped fine. paprika. Now put two cans of seedless tomatoes on the fire to boil. Stir the meat ten or fifteen minutes over a medium fire, and add the boiling tomatoes. Let this simmer slowly for about five hours, and you have a fine spaghetti sauce.
Now take two pounds of imported paste either spaghetti or spaghetini, cover with boiling salt water (use plenty of water). Cook until soft-not too soft to be correct. When done, drain and turn into a saucepan, cover with meat sauce and stir gently over a slow fire for five minutes, to allow the paste to absorb the gravy. Save out a good portion of the sauce to serve at the table over the spaghetti and the meat. Turn into a deep platter, pour over the top some more gravy and sprinkle on the top of all a good handful of grated parmesan cheese. This will furnish a liberal spaghetti dinner for six persons. Henry Leong
This is a braise disguised as a sauce: a single thick piece of beef cooks whole in tomato for five hours, then the meat and the sauce come to the table together over the pasta. Read the ingredient list with care, since the original typesetting has scrambled two lines.
- The garbled lineThe passage reading "one-quarter pound of fresh Season well with salt, pepper and mushrooms, all chopped fine. paprika" is transposed type. It means: add about a quarter pound of fresh mushrooms, chopped fine, then season well with salt, pepper and paprika.
- Larding the beef"Well larded" here means piercing the roast with a knife or larding needle and pushing slivers of salt pork and garlic down into the holes, not draping them over the outside. A 4 lb piece of upper round wants a dozen or more insertions distributed through the muscle.
- A glassful of claretClaret is dry red Bordeaux, and any dry red works. Period cookbooks usually reckon a wineglassful at about 2 fluid ounces, though 'a glassful' here may mean more. Adding it a tablespoon at a time onto browned onions lets each addition reduce almost dry and glaze the pan rather than stewing them.
- Canned seedless tomatoesCanned seedless tomatoes correspond roughly to today's canned peeled plum tomatoes; 'seedless' appears to have indicated a grade screened of seed and skin, though the usage is not precisely documented. Use two standard cans, crushed, brought to a boil before they go into the pot, as the recipe directs.
- The five-hour simmerThis is the hinge. The beef must stay barely at a tremble, with the surface breaking only occasionally; a real boil will squeeze the round dry and stringy long before five hours are up. A heavy pot, a lid set slightly ajar, and the lowest workable burner. Check that the liquid still covers most of the meat and add water if it reduces too far.
- Pasta cooked "until soft""Soft, not too soft to be correct" is an early American gesture at al dente. Cook two minutes short of the package direction, since the drained pasta then spends five more minutes over heat absorbing sauce.
- Serving the meatThe roast is not shredded into the sauce. Lift it out, slice it across the grain, and serve it alongside or on the platter with the spaghetti, with the reserved sauce passed separately.
- YieldSix is modest for 4 lb of beef and 2 lb of dry pasta by modern portions; expect it to stretch further, or to feed six with meat left over.
The Italian entries in a collection like this one are among the most revealing: by the 1900s and 1910s, red-sauce cooking had moved out of immigrant kitchens and into the theatrical restaurants around Broadway, where a late supper of spaghetti was standard. The recipe's insistence on "imported paste" reflects a real distinction of the period, when domestic macaroni was widely thought inferior to Italian. The method itself is a straightforward southern Italian sugo: a large cut of beef braised for hours in tomato, its cooking liquid dressing the pasta, meat and spaghetti coming to the table together. The larding with salt pork and garlic is an older European technique carried over onto a lean American cut, upper round, which needs the fat and the long, low heat to become tender.