Home › The World's Kitchen › Spaghetti, Milanaise
Spaghetti, Milanaise
Have two quarts boiling water in a saucepan on the range with a tablespoon salt. Break three-quarters of a pound best spaghetti into strips one and a half inches long. Drop them into the water and boil for twenty-five minutes. Drain well on a sieve; then place in a sautoire with half ounce butter, three saltspoons salt and two saltspoons white pepper, adding two gills tomato sauce, one medium truffle cut into fine julienne strips, eight sliced canned mushrooms, and one ounce cooked smoked beef tongue also cut into julienne strips; lightly mix, then cook for five minutes. Add two ounces grated Parmesan cheese, mix well, cook for two minutes longer and serve.
A Delmonico's-style pasta dish built on the classic French à la milanaise garnish. Almost everything here translates directly; the boiling time does not.
- The boiling timeTwenty-five minutes will reduce modern dried spaghetti to paste. Today's durum semolina spaghetti needs 8-11 minutes, or a minute less than the box says since it finishes in the pan. Taste rather than time it.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato sauce is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three of salt is 3/4 teaspoon, two of white pepper is 1/2 teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for the dish.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow sauté pan, not a casserole dish. Anything wide enough to toss three-quarters of a pound of pasta without piling it will do.
- Breaking the spaghettiThe inch-and-a-half lengths were most likely for ease of eating rather than thrift. Leave the strands long if you prefer; nothing else changes.
- TruffleOne medium fresh black truffle is a serious expense for a pasta for four. A small jar of preserved truffle peelings, or a teaspoon of truffle butter folded in off the heat, gets you the aroma the dish is aiming at. Truffle oil is a different flavour and mostly synthetic.
- Smoked beef tongueAn ounce of cooked smoked tongue, cut in julienne, is the signature of the Milanaise garnish. Deli-counter tongue works; failing that, a thick-cut slice of good ham or lean smoked bacon, julienned and warmed through, plays the same role.
- Cheese and finishingTwo ounces grated Parmesan is roughly two-thirds of a cup. Add it off direct heat or on the lowest flame and toss quickly; two full minutes over heat after the cheese goes in risks a stringy, oily sauce. A spoonful of the pasta water loosens it if it tightens.
- YieldThree-quarters of a pound of pasta with this much garnish serves four as a first course, two or three as a main.
The International Cook Book came out of the Delmonico's tradition, and this is a French kitchen's reading of Italian food rather than an Italian one. À la milanaise in the classical French repertoire does not mean "as cooked in Milan" so much as a fixed garnish: julienne of tongue, mushroom and truffle, bound with tomato and finished with Parmesan, a formula codified in the grand-hotel kitchens of the late nineteenth century. The tell is the tongue, an ingredient the professional larder was far more likely to have on hand than the home cook. Breaking the spaghetti into short lengths and boiling it well past tenderness reflects how pasta was understood in American dining rooms before the First World War: a soft, sauced, fork-manageable side of the menu, decades before al dente entered English.