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Baked Spaghetti
Boil three-fourths of a pound of spaghetti, moistening it with one-half pint each of bechamel sauce and allemande sauce, seasoning with one-half pinch of ground nutmeg, one pinch of pepper, and adding one-fourth pound of grated cheese. Toss well, put it into a baking-dish, sprinkle the top with grated cheese and breadcrumbs, pour over a little clarified butter and place it in the oven. At the end of about fifteen minutes, when it should be of a nice golden-brown color, take it from the oven, and serve. Spaghetti, Italian Style Put three-fourths of a pound of boiled spaghetti into a saucepan, add one pint of tomato sauce and one-fourth pound of grated Parmesan cheese and season with one-half pinch of pepper and one-half pinch of grated nutmeg. Cook for ten minutes, tossing well, and serve with more cheese.
Spaghetti, Neapolitan Style Boil three-fourths of a pound of fine spaghetti, drain it and put it back into a saucepan with one-half pint each of tomato and Spanish sauce, six mushrooms, two truffles and a small piece of cooked, smoked red beef tongue, all cut up dice-shaped; season with one-half pinch of pepper and one-third of a pinch of grated nutmeg, adding one-fourth of a pound of grated Parmesan cheese. Cook for ten minutes and serve with some cheese, separately.
Three variations on one formula: 12 oz of spaghetti, a pint of sauce, and 4 oz of grated cheese. The first is a gratin, the other two are finished in the pan.
- Half a pintOne cup. Each version wants a pint of sauce total for 12 oz of dry pasta, which is generous by modern standards; in the baked version some of that liquid is absorbed in the oven.
- Oscar's pinchBy the usual convention a pinch is roughly 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon; the book gives no definition. Read "one-third of a pinch" as the smallest amount you can deliberately add.
- Undercook the pastaThe spaghetti is boiled, sauced, then baked fifteen minutes more. Pull it two minutes short of al dente or the finished dish will be soft throughout.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; a hot oven is implied by browning the top in fifteen minutes. Something in the range of 400-425F is a reasonable modern reading.
- Allemande sauceA velouté (blond roux plus veal or chicken stock) finished with egg yolks, cream and lemon. Combined here with an equal quantity of béchamel it makes the baked version far richer than a plain cheese sauce, and it should not be boiled hard once the yolks are in.
- Spanish sauceEspagnole: brown roux, brown stock, tomato, cooked down. Paired with tomato sauce in the Neapolitan version it gives a dark, meaty coating quite unlike a modern Neapolitan tomato sugo.
- Truffles and tongueTwo truffles diced into a pasta dish reflects Waldorf pricing, not household cooking. Cooked smoked beef tongue is still sold by good delis; diced ham or mortadella stands in for the salt and smoke, and the truffles can simply be left out.
- Clarified butterUsed on the crumb topping because the milk solids in whole butter scorch at gratin heat. Melt butter, let it settle, and pour off the clear fat, or use ghee.
- YieldTwelve ounces of dry pasta with this much sauce serves four as a main course, six as a smaller middle course.
Oscar Tschirky's kitchen treated spaghetti as a French cook would, which is why the "Baked" version is bound with béchamel and allemande rather than tomato. Béchamel is one of the classic French foundation sauces; allemande is a velouté derivative that Carême counted among his foundations and that Escoffier later demoted to a daughter sauce. When this book appeared in 1896, large-scale Italian immigration to New York was well underway, and the two pan-finished dishes are labelled "Italian style" and "Neapolitan style". The nutmeg in all three variants reflects French training, where nutmeg is standard in béchamel and in pasta gratins to this day. The heavy hand with cheese -- four ounces to twelve ounces of pasta in every version, specified as Parmesan in the second and third -- suggests the imported cheese was a fixture in the hotel's larder.