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Spaghetti with Cheese
Put one-fourth of a pound of spaghetti, broken into small pieces, in a saucepan of boiling water, with a lump of salt, and boil for twenty minutes. Drain the spaghetti, and place it in a buttered baking-dish. Put one breakfast cupful of grated cheese into a saucepan with one teacupful of milk, and a lump of butter the size of an egg, and stir them over the fire until the cheese is nearly melted. Beat the yolks of two eggs together with one teacupful of milk, then stir them in with the cheese, and pour the whole over the spaghetti, and bake in a quick oven till of a rich yellow color. The cheese will be rendered tough if cooked too long. The spaghetti should be served while very hot.
A baked macaroni-cheese in all but name, built on an egg-yolk custard rather than a flour roux. Two things need attention: the pasta is boiled far longer than anyone would boil it now, and the sauce is a custard that will break if the oven does more than set it.
- Boil twenty minutes, noNineteenth-century dried pasta was coarser and often kept a long time, and it was cooked to complete softness by preference. Modern spaghetti wants 8-10 minutes, and here it should be pulled a minute short since it finishes in the oven.
- Cup sizesA breakfast cupful is roughly a full 8-10 oz cup; a teacupful is smaller, about 6 oz or three-quarters of a cup. So read this as about 1 cup grated cheese, 3/4 cup milk in the pan and another 3/4 cup beaten with the yolks.
- Butter the size of an eggStandard period shorthand for about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- A quick ovenProbably in the region of 400-425F, though the book gives no temperature. At that heat the dish needs only long enough to colour the top, perhaps 10-15 minutes; the sauce is already hot when it goes in.
- The hingeOscar's own warning is the important line: the cheese toughens if cooked too long. Melt it gently and off a hard boil, and take the dish out as soon as the top is golden. Overbaking curdles the yolks and squeezes the fat out of the cheese into an oily film.
- The cheeseNo type is specified. A firm Cheddar (the sort of cheese often sold simply as 'American cheese') suits the dish, though for spaghetti a hard grating cheese is equally plausible. Whatever is used, grate it finely so it melts before the milk gets hot enough to seize it.
- Tempering the yolksBeat the yolks with the cold milk as written, then add the warm cheese mixture to them in a stream rather than the reverse. Poured straight into a hot pan they scramble.
- YieldA quarter-pound of pasta serves two as a main course or four as a side.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who gave this book its name, was never technically the Waldorf's chef, but his 1896 collection is a very large general compilation, much of it standard American and European household fare. Spaghetti was still a relative newcomer to such books: Italian immigration was transforming New York's food supply through the 1880s and 90s, and dried pasta was moving from imported delicacy to grocery staple. What the book does with it is telling — rather than a tomato sauce, it gets the treatment already familiar from baked macaroni, a cheese custard browned in a hot oven, a dish English and American cooks had been making since well before pasta had an Italian accent in the popular mind. The instruction that cheese "will be rendered tough if cooked too long" is the sort of practical note that suggests hands-on experience at the stove.