Spaghetti
Spaghetti may be cooked in any way in which macaroni is cooked, but is usually served with Tomato Sauce.
It is cooked in long strips rather than broken in pieces; to accomplish this, hold quantity to be cooked in the hand, and dip ends in boiling salted water; as spaghetti softens it will bend, and may be coiled under water.
Knöfli Beat two eggs slightly and add one-fourth cup milk. Add gradually to one cup flour mixed and sifted with one teaspoon salt. Place colander over a kettle of boiling water, turn in one-third mixture, and force through colander into water, using a potato masher. As soon as buttons come to top of water, remove with skimmer to hot vegetable dish, and sprinkle with salt and grated cheese; repeat until mixture is used. Let stand in oven five minutes, then serve. 1½ cups flour ½ egg Warm water 1/4 cup cracker crumbs
Two things are running together here: a short note on boiling spaghetti in full lengths, and Knöfli, a batter dumpling pushed through a colander into boiling water. Both are straightforward, but a few details in the 1896 text need translating.
- The hinge for KnöfliThe batter must be loose enough to extrude but stiff enough to hold a shape — thick like a heavy pancake batter, not pourable. If it runs through the colander in threads rather than dropping in buttons, beat in another tablespoon or two of flour before continuing.
- Colander and masherYou want a metal colander with holes roughly 1/4 inch across, held a few inches above the water so the buttons drop cleanly. A spätzle press or a flat perforated spätzle board with a scraper does the same job with less mess.
- Cooking timeThe dumplings are done within a minute or two of floating. Fish them out promptly — held longer they swell, absorb water and turn pasty.
- Work in batchesThe instruction to do one-third at a time is not padding. Crowding the pot drops the temperature and the buttons stick together in a mass.
- "Let stand in oven five minutes"The book gives no temperature; this is a warming step only, long enough for the cheese to melt and the dish to heat through. It is not a baking step.
- Salting the pasta waterThe recipe calls only for boiling salted water and gives no proportion here. For the spaghetti, the coiling trick still works: the ends soften in under a minute and the strands bend without breaking.
- YieldOne cup of flour, two eggs and 1/4 cup milk gives about two to three servings as a side dish. Grated Parmesan or a dry aged cheese suits it better than a soft melting cheese.
- The stray ingredient listThe fragment at the end — 1½ cups flour, ½ egg, warm water, 1/4 cup cracker crumbs — appears to be stranded from another recipe and gives no method or proportions of water. It cannot be reconstructed from what is printed here; ignore it.
Knöfli belongs to the Swiss-German and Swabian dumpling family, alongside Knöpfli and Spätzle; the name is generally taken to derive from the word for 'button' (as in Knöpfli), which is what the method here calls them — 'as soon as buttons come to top of water'. Its appearance in a Boston book alongside spaghetti reflects how such books filed starch cookery together — Italian pasta, German dumplings, boiled rice and hominy grouped by the fact that they were flour or grain cooked in water rather than by cuisine. The note on spaghetti is telling in itself: Farmer explains it by reference to macaroni, which she assumes her readers already know, and has to say that the long strands are coiled into the pot rather than snapped in half.