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Macaroni or Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce
Break the macaroni into inch lengths, or the spaghetti into three-inch lengths; or place the ends of spaghetti in hot water and coil it as it softens; cover with plenty of water and boil until soft, about forty-five minutes generally being required. Stir often to prevent it from sticking to the kettle. Turn into a sieve and drain thoroughly. Place in the serving dish and cover with tomato sauce. Also serve grated Parmesan cheese with it. This cheese may also be mixed in with the tomato sauce.
A plain American treatment of pasta from 1911, and the one thing worth changing is the boiling time.
- Forty-five minutes is far too longModern dried pasta is extruded and dried differently and needs 8 to 12 minutes in fast-boiling water; check the package and taste from about a minute before the stated time. Forty-five minutes gives a paste with no bite at all, which is closer to what the period expected of macaroni than to anything served today.
- Salt the waterThe recipe calls for "plenty of water" but no salt, and the pasta will taste flat without it. Roughly a tablespoon of salt for four quarts of water, added once it boils.
- Breaking the pastaCutting macaroni into inch lengths made sense when it was sold in long tubes; boxed elbows need no breaking. The trick of standing spaghetti ends in the hot water and coiling it as it softens still works in a pan too small for full-length strands.
- DrainingDrain but do not rinse, and do not let it sit and dry out in the sieve. Reserve a little of the cooking water to loosen the sauce if it has thickened.
- The tomato sauceNo sauce recipe is given here; presumably the book's own tomato sauce is intended. Any straightforward tomato sauce works; count on about 2 cups for a pound of pasta.
- ParmesanGrate it yourself from a wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano or a domestic hard grating cheese. Pre-grated tubs are drier and saltier and will not melt into the sauce the way the recipe intends.
- YieldNo quantity is given. A pound of dried pasta with 2 cups of sauce serves four as a main dish or six as a side.
Macaroni was well established in American kitchens by 1911 but still often treated as a starchy side rather than a dish in its own right — a habit that mass Italian immigration, well under way by then, was gradually reshaping. The Butterick Publishing Company sold this book alongside its dress patterns and The Delineator magazine, aiming squarely at the middle-class housekeeper, and the recipe's careful explanation of how to coil spaghetti into the pot suggests long strands were still unfamiliar to many readers who knew only the cut tubes. The insistence on Parmesan, either passed separately or stirred into the sauce, is a nod toward Italian practice; the forty-five-minute boil is not, and reflects a general Anglo-American preference of the era for pasta cooked to complete softness.