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Italian Spaghetti
Mrs. Leonard Disney.
Cook 1 package spaghetti in salted water 15 minutes-drain, put in buttered baking dish, cover with layer of bread crumbs, then another layer of spaghetti, then a layer of tomatoes peeled and cut into small pieces. Add salt, pepper and a few dots of butter, and green pepper chopped. Put in another layer of spaghetti and add a little minced onion, then tomato, butter, and a little salt. Cover with bread crumbs and a little grated cheese; bake in a moderate oven about 40 minutes. Mrs. Clair Smart.
A layered baked spaghetti of the kind that filled American church cookbooks in the early twentieth century. The method is sound; only the pasta timing and a few unstated quantities need attention.
- Boil the spaghetti shortFifteen minutes in the pot followed by forty in the oven will give you a soft, uniform mass. Boil it about half the package direction — 4 to 5 minutes, well short of al dente — since it keeps cooking in the dish.
- "1 package"Spaghetti of this period was commonly sold loose or in one-pound boxes; a pound of dry pasta is the safe reading. That fills a 9x13 dish generously and serves six to eight.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F; period tables put a moderate oven anywhere from roughly 350 to 375F. Forty minutes gets the crumb top browned and the tomato juices bubbling at the edges; cover with foil for the first twenty if the top colors too fast.
- The tomatoesFresh peeled tomatoes, cut small, as the recipe specifies. A 28-oz can of whole tomatoes, drained well and torn up, works out of season, but drain them or the crumb layers turn to paste.
- Bread crumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not the fine commercial sort. The interior crumb layer is there to absorb tomato liquid, so make it a real layer, not a dusting.
- The cheeseUnspecified, as it usually is in these books; a mild grating cheese such as a firm American or a dry Parmesan-style is in period. It goes only on top, mixed into the final crumbs.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper, onion and green pepper are the whole seasoning — no garlic, no herbs, no oil. That restraint is typical of the era's printed recipes, though the dish takes well to more if you want it.
Baked spaghetti dishes labeled "Italian" appear throughout American community cookbooks from roughly 1900 onward, and they say more about the cook than about Italy: dried pasta had become cheap and widely available through grocers, and households absorbed it into the layered, crumb-topped, buttered casserole format they already knew from scalloped potatoes and escalloped corn. Tomatoes, green pepper and a little onion stood in for anything more specifically Italian, and the sauce is built in the dish rather than cooked separately — a labor-saving habit typical of luncheon cookery meant to go into the oven and be forgotten. The double attribution here, with the recipe tied to two names, is a common feature of community compilations.