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Macaroni or Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce
Break the macaroni or spaghetti into short lengths. Cover with plenty of boiling water and boil until soft, twenty to thirty minutes generally being required. Stir occasionally with a fork to prevent sticking to the kettle. Turn into a sieve and drain thoroughly. Place in the serving-dish and cover with tomato sauce. Serve grated cheese with it. This cheese may be mixed with the tomato sauce. Some people prefer spaghetti cooked in long pieces. To do this place the ends in boiling water and coil it as it softens.
A plain method from the era when pasta was boiled to complete softness and treated as a vegetable course. Almost everything here still works; the timing does not.
- The cooking timeTwenty to thirty minutes will reduce modern dried pasta to paste. Contemporary extruded semolina macaroni or spaghetti needs 8-12 minutes depending on shape and thickness; start tasting two minutes before the package time. The long boil in the original reflects the period preference for very soft pasta, and possibly a softer wheat than modern durum semolina.
- Salt the waterThe recipe omits it entirely, leaving the sauce and cheese to carry the seasoning. Roughly a tablespoon of salt per four quarts of water makes the difference between seasoned pasta and bland pasta.
- "Plenty of boiling water"Four quarts to a pound is the usual modern ratio, in a tall pot. Ample water helps keep the pieces from sticking, though the occasional stir with a fork does much of that work too.
- Do not rinseTurning it into a sieve and draining is right; washing it under the tap is not. Rinsing strips the surface starch that helps tomato sauce cling. Drain and dress at once, while hot.
- The sauceNo sauce recipe is given here; the tomato sauce is presumably given elsewhere in the book. Figure on about two cups of sauce to a pound of dry pasta if you want it coated rather than swimming.
- The cheeseGrated cheese in a book of this date often means Parmesan, though a dry aged American cheese was also common. Grate it fresh; pre-grated cheese with anti-caking starch melts less smoothly into the sauce.
- Coiling long spaghettiThe technique described still works and is worth doing: lay the ends in the boiling water and press down as they soften until the whole coil submerges. Breaking is only necessary if your pot is shallow.
- YieldA pound of dry pasta serves four as a main dish, six to eight as a side dish.
Filing macaroni under Vegetables looks odd now, but it was not unusual in American household books of the early twentieth century: pasta was treated as a meatless dish served alongside or in place of a starch vegetable. Macaroni had been familiar to well-off American tables since the late eighteenth century, and is often traced to Thomas Jefferson's enthusiasm for it, but it became widely common only after industrial dried pasta and cheap canned tomatoes became available in the later nineteenth century.