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Beef Hash with Spaghetti (Lb spaghetti cup milk lb)
1 lb. spaghetti. 1/2 cup milk. 1/4 lb. cheese. 1 tablespoon butter. Make beef hash. When spaghetti has cooked wash and drain. Put in layers in baking pan with cheese and butter and a thick layer of hash between. Pour milk over this and bake until brown.
A leftovers assembly rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a pan of beef hash and treats spaghetti as the starch that stretches it. A few blanks need filling before it will work.
- The hash is not on the list"Make beef hash" assumes a hash recipe the reader already has, presumably given elsewhere. Reckon on about 3 cups of cooked hash — roughly 1 lb chopped cooked beef with an equal bulk of cooked potato and onion, moistened with a little stock or gravy so it does not dry out in the oven.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A layered gratin of this kind wants 375F, 30 to 40 minutes, since everything in it is already cooked and you are only heating through and browning the top.
- "Wash and drain"Rinsing boiled spaghetti to remove surface starch was a common enough direction in books of this vintage; cold water will also stop the cooking. It does no harm here because sauce adhesion is irrelevant, but drain it very well or the dish turns watery.
- Cook the spaghetti shortBoil it a minute or two shy of al dente. It will soften further in the oven, and a full pound of fully cooked pasta collapses into paste under 40 minutes of baking.
- The milk is scantHalf a cup over a pound of pasta is barely a moistening. If your hash is dry, a cup of milk or thin gravy gives a better result; more than that and the layers loosen.
- CheeseA quarter pound is about 1 cup grated. The recipe says only "cheese"; a firm American store cheese is the likeliest reading, and a sharp Cheddar is the closest thing now. Grate it rather than slicing so it melts before the top browns.
- AssemblySpaghetti, cheese and butter on the bottom, a thick layer of hash, then the rest of the spaghetti and cheese on top so there is something to brown. Butter the pan; nothing in the method prevents sticking.
- YieldA pound of spaghetti plus the hash fills a 9x13 pan and serves six to eight as a main dish.
Mary A. Wilson wrote a long-running food column for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and her books came out of wartime and immediately post-war economy cooking, when stretching a small amount of meat with a cheap starch was the household virtue being taught. That explains the shape of this dish — yesterday's beef, extended twice over by pasta and milk — and American cookbooks of the period are generally said to have filed macaroni and spaghetti with the starchy side dishes rather than giving pasta a chapter of its own. Boxed spaghetti was by then widely available in American groceries, and by most accounts cheap and sold well outside Italian-American neighborhoods, and it turns up in books like this one detached from any Italian context: boiled, rinsed, layered with Cheddar-type cheese and baked, in the manner of a macaroni and cheese.