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Beef Hash with Spaghetti (Lb spaghetti lb cheese cup)
1 lb. spaghetti. 1/4 lb. cheese. 1/2 cup milk. 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 leftover-beef casserole written in the compressed style Mrs. Wilson used throughout the book, assuming the reader already knows how to make hash and how hot to run an oven. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A dish of this kind, assembled from already-cooked components and needing only to heat through and brown, wants 375F for 25 to 30 minutes. Higher and the exposed spaghetti on top dries to straw before the middle is hot.
- The hash is a separate recipeThe recipe assumes you already have beef hash made and ready, and gives no quantity; you want enough for a thick layer, on the order of a pound to a pound and a half. If you are working from raw beef, brown and cook it fully first; nothing in this assembly cooks raw meat through.
- "Wash and drain" the spaghettiThe instruction most likely means rinsing the boiled pasta to take off surface starch. It is not wrong here, since the pasta is going into a layered bake rather than a sauce, but drain it thoroughly or the milk will pool. Boil it two minutes short of done.
- The cheeseAn unspecified "cheese" in an American book of this period most likely meant a firm store cheddar. Grate it rather than slicing, and hold back a third for the top layer to get the browning the recipe asks for.
- Half a cup of milk is scantWith a pound of dry pasta this barely dampens the dish. Three quarters of a cup to a cup gives a moist result without turning it soupy, particularly if your hash is on the dry side.
- Season as you layerNo salt or pepper appears anywhere in the ingredient list. Season the hash properly and add pepper between the layers; unseasoned pasta and milk will otherwise flatten the whole dish.
- YieldA pound of spaghetti plus hash fills a 9x13 pan and feeds six to eight.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for wartime and immediately post-war American households, and this recipe carries the marks of it: a small quantity of cheese and butter stretched across a pound of cheap pasta, with yesterday's roast reappearing as hash in the middle. Spaghetti entered mainstream American cookbooks in this period less as an Italian dish than as an economical starch to be treated like macaroni, baked with milk and cheese and whatever meat was on hand. The layered milk-and-cheese bake is the same logic as macaroni and cheese, and the presence of hash between the layers is a thrift instruction as much as a flavour one, since domestic-science writers of the 1910s and 1920s were under real pressure to show cooks how to use up every scrap of a joint of beef.