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Spaghetti a L'Italienne
Have a pan on the fire with three quarts water and a tablespoon salt; when thoroughly boiling, gently slide in three-quarters of a pound fine Italian spaghetti, without breaking it, and boil for twenty-five minutes. Remove and thoroughly drain.
Then place in a sautoire with a good tablespoon butter, a saltspoon salt, a good saltspoon white pepper and a light saltspoon grated nutmeg. Toss gently on the fire for four minutes. Add a light half-pint hot tomato sauce, gently mix with a fork, then add two ounces grated Parmesan or Swiss cheese and mix well again with the fork for one minute longer. Dress on a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward buttered-and-sauced spaghetti, but the boiling time belongs to an era of much thicker, softer-dried pasta. Cut it drastically.
- The boiling timeTwenty-five minutes will reduce modern dried spaghetti to paste. Start tasting at 8 minutes and drain while the strands still have resistance at the center; they finish cooking in the butter and sauce.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. So: 1/4 teaspoon salt, a generous 1/4 teaspoon white pepper, and a scant 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg for the whole dish.
- Half a pintA light half-pint of tomato sauce is a scant cup. This is a lightly dressed pasta, not a sauced one — the butter and cheese do most of the work.
- SautoireA sautoire is a straight-sided shallow pan. Any wide skillet or sauté pan large enough to toss the spaghetti without breaking it will do.
- Salt in the waterOne tablespoon to three quarts is on the light side by current practice; many modern recipes call for more. Salt it enough that the water tastes seasoned.
- The cheeseGrate the Parmesan or Swiss cheese finely and add it off direct heat or over the lowest flame, tossing with the fork as directed, or it will clump into strings rather than coating the strands.
- Pasta waterReserve a few tablespoons of the cooking water before draining. If the finished dish looks dry or the cheese seizes, a splash will bring it back together.
- YieldThree-quarters of a pound feeds three as a main course, four to six as a first course in the Italian manner the title implies.
Spaghetti reached most English-speaking cookbooks late and arrived pre-labelled as foreign "à l'italienne" — hence the French tag à l'italienne on a dish of Italian pasta, a convention of the French professional idiom in which every garnish and treatment carried a national name. The nutmeg suggests a professional rather than a household Italian dish: grated nutmeg in butter-and-cheese pasta belongs to the French and Northern Italian repertoire of the period, and it shows up alongside white pepper, plausibly the choice of a cook who did not want black flecks in a pale dish. The instruction not to break the strands, and the choice of "Parmesan or Swiss," may both reflect a moment when true Parmigiano was not always to hand.