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Noodles with Tomatoes
Prepare the same amount of noodles and plunge them in two quarts boiling water, with a teaspoon salt and boil for twenty-five minutes. Drain on a sieve, then place them in a sauteuse with two gills tomato sauce, one ounce butter, light teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper. Mix well with a fork, cook for five minutes, then strew in one ounce grated Parmesan and one ounce Swiss cheese, mix well again with the fork, pour them on a hot deep dish and serve.
A plain pasta al pomodoro from a period when American cookbooks still treated noodles as a German dish and tomato sauce as a French one. Almost everything here works as written except the boiling time.
- Ignore the twenty-five minutesTwenty-five minutes will reduce any modern noodle to paste. Dried egg noodles want 6-10 minutes, fresh ones 2-4; cook until just tender, since they get five more minutes in the pan afterwards.
- "The same amount"The quantity refers back to the preceding recipe in the book and is lost here. The sauce and cheese quantities suit about 8 oz of dried noodles, which serves three as a main or four as a side.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato sauce is one cup. Use a smooth, fairly thick sauce rather than a chunky one.
- SauteuseA sauteuse is a wide, shallow saute pan, usually with sloping sides, not a casserole dish. Any large skillet that will hold the noodles in a shallow layer works.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making three of them about three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper. That is aggressive by current taste; start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust.
- The cheeses"Swiss" here means Gruyere or Emmental. Grate it finely and add it off the heat or over very low heat with the Parmesan, tossing constantly, or the Gruyere strings and the sauce breaks.
- Drain, do not rinseThe instruction to drain on a sieve is fine, but leave the noodles slightly wet. Reserve a few tablespoons of the cooking water to loosen the sauce when the cheese goes in.
The International Cook Book is generally credited to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its organising idea was to gather dishes from every national cuisine its author could name into a single alphabetical sweep. Noodles arrive in that survey with a divided identity: the word itself comes from the German Nudel, but the treatment here -- tomato sauce, butter, Parmesan -- is Italian in everything but vocabulary. The pairing of Parmesan with Swiss cheese sets the grana against the Gruyere, one for salt and savour, the other for the melt, and it turns up in gratins and macaroni dishes of the same decade. The very long boiling time is the tell of an era before al dente became an expectation in English-language cookbooks; pasta was cooked soft.