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Spaghetti, Napolitaine
Place in a saucepan a half ounce butter with a few mushroom trimmings and brown for five minutes, tossing well meanwhile. Pour in two gills demi-glace and two gills tomato sauce, adding a half pound raw shin of beef, one bean crushed garlic, four minced shallots, one branch parsley and five dried mushrooms. Lightly mix, cover the pan, and place in oven for one hour. Remove, strain the sauce through a Chinese strainer and keep hot. Plunge a half pound spaghetti in a quart boiling water with a half teaspoon salt and boil for twenty-five minutes. Drain on a sieve, then place in a frying pan on the fire and add the sauce, mix well and cook for five minutes. Add two ounces of grated Parmesan cheese, mix well with a fork, pour into a deep dish and serve.
A hotel-kitchen sauce written for cooks who already had demi-glace on hand and boiled pasta into submission. Two things need fixing before this works on a modern stove.
- The spaghetti timeTwenty-five minutes will give you paste. Dried spaghetti today wants 8-10 minutes, and here it should come out a minute short of al dente since it finishes for five minutes in the pan with the sauce.
- Water for the pastaA quart of water for half a pound of spaghetti is far too little; the strands will clump and the water will gum. Use four quarts, salted more generously than the half teaspoon given.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills demi-glace and two gills tomato sauce means one cup of each, for a total of two cups of liquid before reduction.
- Demi-glaceThe book assumes a brown veal-and-bone reduction kept standing in the kitchen. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace works; failing that, use a cup of strongly reduced beef stock, accepting that the sauce will be thinner and less glossy.
- "One bean crushed garlic"Read this as a single clove; "bean" here stands for a clove-sized piece.
- The shin of beefThe meat is flavoring, not an ingredient of the finished dish; it is strained out with the mushrooms and aromatics. Half a pound of raw shin, cut small so it gives up its gelatin in an hour, then discarded or saved for another use.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. An hour of covered braising to draw flavor from the shin means a moderate oven, 325-350F, hot enough to hold a bare simmer under the lid without reducing the sauce to nothing.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the cone-shaped fine strainer. A fine-mesh sieve does the job; press the solids to get everything out of them.
- Dried mushroomsFive dried mushrooms go in dry here and rehydrate in the sauce. The book does not say which kind; porcini give a suitable depth, and their soaking liquid, if you soak them first, is worth adding in place of some of the stock.
- YieldHalf a pound of spaghetti with two cups of sauce serves two generously or three as a first course.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reflects that world: a French professional repertoire with dishes from everywhere else translated into its terms. "Napolitaine" here does not mean the plain tomato-and-basil sauce a Neapolitan cook would recognize; it means a French brown sauce, demi-glace, cut with tomato and enriched with beef and mushrooms. The long boil for the pasta is not an error of transcription but in line with Anglo-American cookbooks of the period; the taste for firm, al dente pasta appears to have reached American cookbooks only later.