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Goulash (Lb hamburger qt tomatoes)
1 lb. hamburger 1 qt. tomatoes, strained 1.pkg. spaghetti Cook spaghetti in the usual way. Cook hamburger and tomatoes 1 T chopped onion 1 T butter Pepper and salt to taste together for 20 minutes, add cooked spaghetti, onion, seasoning and cook 10 minutes longer.
Katie Hafemann. 1 C cooked spaghetti 1 C hot milk 1 C soft bread crumbs 1 C grated cheese
A plain skillet supper written in the compressed style of a church-society book, with the ingredient column and the method interleaved on the page. Read it as: brown the beef, simmer with tomatoes, then finish with the drained spaghetti.
- The stray ingredient listThe four items at the end — cooked spaghetti, hot milk, bread crumbs, grated cheese — do not belong to this goulash. They appear to be the beginning of an adjacent recipe caught by the transcription. Ignore them here.
- A quart of strained tomatoesFour cups. Canned crushed tomatoes or passata is the closest match; if using whole canned tomatoes, put them through a sieve or food mill as directed, since the point of straining was to remove seeds and skins, not to thin the sauce.
- A package of spaghettiThe size is not recorded, and packages varied. Use about 8 oz against 1 lb of beef; a modern 1-lb box will swamp the sauce.
- Brown the meat first"Cook hamburger and tomatoes together" will give you grey crumbles in a red liquid. Break the beef up in the dry pan over decent heat until it takes colour, pour off the fat, then add the tomatoes.
- The onion and butterThe butter is listed but never mentioned again, and the raw onion goes in at the very end — ten minutes is not enough to cook it through. Soften the tablespoon of chopped onion in the butter before the beef goes in and the dish improves without any change to the ingredients.
- Undercook the spaghettiIt gets a further ten minutes in the sauce. Boil it a couple of minutes short of al dente and drain it well, or the finished dish turns soft and starchy.
- SeasoningThe tomatoes may carry no salt of their own, so "salt to taste" is likely to mean a real quantity — start with a teaspoon for the whole pan and adjust.
- YieldNo yield is given. The quantities suggest about four servings, or more as part of a luncheon with bread and a salad.
American "goulash" of this kind shares little with Hungarian gulyás, a slow beef stew built on onions and sweet paprika — there is no paprika here at all. By the early twentieth century the name had drifted in the United States until it could mean almost any skillet mixture of ground beef, tomato and a starch, and it is particularly associated with the Midwest. The recipe leans on the canned tomato and the boxed pasta package: both cheap, both shelf-stable, both assumed to be in the cupboard, and dishes of this kind are a staple of community cookbooks.