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Baked Noodles, Spinach and Cheese (Cups cooked egg noodles pound)
2 cups cooked egg noodles 1/2 pound cheese, grated 2 cups cooked spinach, chopped 1 cup milk 4 tablespoons shortening 1 tablespoon flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper paprika Place the cooked noodles in the bottom of a greased baking dish and cover them with half the grated cheese. Put the chopped spinach over the cheese. Make a sauce of the milk, shortening, flour and seasonings and pour it over the spinach. Sprinkle the remaining grated cheese on the sauce and bake the dish in a hot 450 degrees oven for 10 minutes or until top is brown. Serves 6.
A quick layered casserole from the era when a "one-dish meal" meant supper assembled from what was already cooked. Almost everything here comes to the dish pre-cooked, so the ten minutes in the oven is only for melting and browning.
- The sauce ratio is the weak pointOne tablespoon of flour will not thicken a cup of milk against four tablespoons of fat; you will get a greasy pour rather than a sauce. A standard white sauce uses equal measures of fat and flour, roughly 2 tablespoons each per cup of milk, and needs a minute or two of cooking after it comes to a simmer to lose the raw-flour taste.
- ShorteningIn a book of this period shortening means hydrogenated vegetable fat or lard. Butter is the better choice in a milk sauce.
- Hot oven450F is correct as printed, and the short time depends on it. Everything in the dish is already hot or already cooked, so the oven is doing nothing but browning the cheese top.
- Drain the spinach hardTwo cups of cooked chopped spinach carries a great deal of water. Press it in a sieve or wring it in a towel, or the sauce will thin out and pool under the noodles.
- The cheeseUnspecified 'cheese, grated' in an American book of this kind most likely meant a mild everyday cheddar or processed cheese. Half a pound is about 2 cups grated, split between the two layers. A sharper cheddar is an improvement, since there is nothing else in the dish for flavour.
- NoodlesTwo cups cooked is roughly 4 ounces dry egg noodles. Cook them a shade under, since they will sit under hot sauce.
- Season more than toldA quarter teaspoon of salt for six servings is very little once spinach and a milk sauce are involved. Taste the sauce before it goes over the spinach.
- YieldSix servings is optimistic as a main course; treat it as six side portions or four suppers, and use a dish of about 8 by 8 inches so the layers stay distinct.
Layered noodle-and-cheese bakes like this one belong to the American 'one-dish meal' vogue associated with the interwar decades, when home economics teaching pushed the casserole as an economical way to get a starch, a vegetable, and a protein onto the table in a single vessel and a single oven. The structure here is typical: a starch base, a green vegetable, a white sauce made by the standard flour-fat-milk method, and cheese to brown the top. Paprika appears in the ingredient list and nowhere in the method; a dusting of paprika over pale food was a common finishing touch of the period, valued for colour rather than heat.