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Spaghetti with Cream Sauce
Take one handful of the stick macaroni without breaking it, plunge it into boiling salted water, and boil until tender. As the stick softens, bend and coil it in the water, but be careful not to break. When cooked drain the spaghetti, and pour cold water through it. Serve with cream sauce.
A short entry that assumes two things a modern cook does not: that pasta comes as long rigid sticks to be coiled into the pot, and that "cream sauce" needs no explanation. Both are easy to supply.
- The hinge: don't overcook, and reconsider the rinse"boil until tender" in a book of this date means softer than modern al dente; period pasta directions generally ran much longer than ours. Dried spaghetti today wants 8-11 minutes for al dente; check the box and taste a strand a minute or two early.
- Why the cold water, and when to skip itRinsing washes off surface starch and stops the cooking. The recipe does not say why it is wanted here; if you are saucing and serving immediately, skip it, since that starch is what makes the cream sauce cling.
- "Stick macaroni"Macaroni was a general term for dried wheat pasta; the sticks were long, straight and brittle, and did not fit an ordinary pot without bending. Any modern long spaghetti behaves the same way once the ends soften, within a minute or so.
- A handfulRoughly 4 oz / 115 g of dry pasta, which is one generous portion or two side servings. Scale by weight rather than by grip.
- Salted waterThe book takes for granted that the water is well salted. Figure about 1 tablespoon of salt to 4 quarts of water, and use the full 4 quarts for a single handful so the strands move freely.
- Cream sauceIn books of this period that means a white sauce: butter and flour cooked together without colouring, with milk or cream whisked in and seasoned; consult the book's own cream sauce entry for its exact seasoning. Allow about a cup of sauce per 4 oz of dry pasta, and thin it with a spoonful of the pasta water if it tightens.
- FinishingGrated Parmesan is not mentioned, though cheese was a common accompaniment to macaroni in this period; a light dusting and a brief pass under the broiler gives a gratin version.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf, but as maître d'hôtel he collected and published its kitchen's working repertoire in The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), a volume aimed as much at ambitious American households as at professionals. Spaghetti had a slightly foreign, slightly luxurious standing in such a book: Italian pasta was imported or made by a handful of American factories, sold in long stiff sticks rather than the cut lengths that later became standard, and the instruction not to break them belongs to that world of long, unbroken strands. Dressing it in a French cream sauce rather than tomato is characteristic of the period's grand-hotel cooking, which routinely took an Italian ingredient and finished it in the French manner; tomato sauce with pasta is often said to have become the American default only later, though the chronology is less tidy than that suggests.