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Spaghetti Loaf
1 C cooked spaghetti. 1 C hot milk. 1 C soft bread crumbs. 1 C grated cheese. 2 T butter 1 t each red pepper, green pepper, onion, parsley, salt 3 eggs Cook spaghetti, scald milk, add crumbs, cheese and butter. When smooth, add seasonings, chopped, and slightly beaten eggs. Pour into greased paper-lined bread tin. Bake 1 hour in moderate oven. with tomato sauce.
Serve Mrs. Lester.
SPAGHETTI (Italian) CHOP SUEY ¼ lb. bacon 1 pkg. spaghetti 3 onions 1 pt. can tomatoes ¼ lb. cheese 1 lb. Round steak, ground 1 stalk celery Salt and pepper Boil spaghetti twenty minutes in salt water. Rinse with cold water and drain. Cut bacon into small cubes, slice onions very thin. Grind the round steak and grate the cheese. Put bacon in a Scotch pot and fry to a light brown. Add onions and fry to a light brown, then add steak and cook thoroughly. Add tomatoes and spaghetti. Salt and pepper to taste. Let simmer for fifteen minutes, then add cheese. Serve in casserole. Makes eight servings.
Two recipes ran together here, and both were typeset with fractions lost. The first is a baked spaghetti custard; the second is a skillet meat sauce that a 1920s Midwestern church congregation was happy to call chop suey.
- The loaf's ingredient list is incompleteThe method calls for spaghetti, milk, bread crumbs and cheese, none of which appear in the printed list. Working from comparable loaves of the period, figure roughly 1/2 lb cooked spaghetti, 2 cups scalded milk, 1 cup soft crumbs and 1 cup grated cheese for a standard loaf tin. Treat these as reconstruction, not the original.
- Broken fractions in the second recipe"14 lb. bacon" is 1/4 lb; the fraction bar dropped out in printing. "4 lb. cheese" has lost a digit too and is most likely 1/4 lb, though the original figure cannot be recovered with certainty. A quarter pound of bacon and a quarter pound of grated cheese are in proportion to 1 lb of beef and a package of spaghetti.
- Moderate oven350F. The loaf is a custard bound with three eggs, so it wants steady moderate heat; an hour at 350F sets it through without curdling the milk.
- The paper lining is the hingeGrease the tin and line it with parchment cut to fit the bottom and long sides, leaving overhangs. A baked spaghetti custard is apt to stick to bare metal, and the overhangs let you lift it out whole to slice.
- Rest before slicingLet the loaf stand 10 to 15 minutes out of the oven. Cut hot from the tin it slumps; cooled slightly it slices clean.
- Spaghetti timingTwenty minutes in salt water was a common instruction in American cookbooks of the period, which generally cooked pasta well past what would now be called done. Modern boxed spaghetti is done in 8 to 11 minutes; for the loaf, cook it just short of tender since it will bake for another hour.
- Scotch pot and casseroleA Scotch pot is a deep, heavy, straight-sided lidded pan of the cast-iron type. "Serve in casserole" here means serve in the deep dish rather than bake in it -- the sauce is finished on the stovetop.
- Adding the cheeseTake the pot off the heat, or down to the barest heat, before stirring in the grated cheese. Held at a simmer it separates and turns stringy and greasy.
Community cookbooks like this one show Italian ingredients arriving through a distinctly Anglo-American filter, and this pair of recipes catches the moment. Spaghetti had become cheap and widely available in packages, but it was handled like macaroni: boiled long past tenderness, bound with milk, crumbs, eggs and cheese, and baked into a sliceable loaf to be served at luncheon with tomato sauce, in the same manner as a salmon or veal loaf. The second recipe's title is more telling still -- "Spaghetti (Italian) Chop Suey" applies a term from American Chinese restaurant cooking, which by then simply meant a mixed dish of chopped things cooked together, to a beef-and-tomato sauce. The loaf is credited to a named contributor, Mrs. Lester, the usual currency of a church fundraising cookbook, where the point was to record what a neighbor actually cooked rather than what any authority said was correct.