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Spaghetti, Paysanne
Plunge in two quarts boiling water three-quarters of a pound of the best quality spaghetti. Season the water with a tablespoon salt; cover the pan and boil for fifteen minutes. Then drain on a sieve; replace the spaghetti in the saucepan; season with a saltspoon salt and a saltspoon white pepper, adding one ounce good butter divided in small pieces; lightly mix with a wooden spoon for two minutes, then place the pan on the fire and add one ounce grated Parmesan cheese and one ounce grated Swiss cheese. Lightly mix again for five minutes while heating well. Dress on a hot dish and serve very hot.
A plain buttered-and-cheesed spaghetti, of the kind that predates the American assumption that pasta arrives under tomato sauce. Two things need adjusting: the water and the clock.
- Use more waterTwo quarts for three-quarters of a pound is tight; the starch concentrates and the strands stick. Four quarts is the usual modern recommendation, with the tablespoon of salt kept as written.
- Fifteen minutes is too longFifteen minutes is likely too long for modern pasta -- cook to the package time, tasting from about seven minutes, and stop while there is still resistance at the center, since the recipe adds five more minutes on the heat with the cheese.
- Save the cooking waterThe recipe drains the pasta and then asks you to hold it over heat for five more minutes with butter and cheese. Without a few tablespoons of the starchy water, the cheese tightens into strings. Reserve half a cup before draining.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. So a quarter teaspoon each of salt and white pepper for the finished dish, on top of the salted water.
- The ouncesOne ounce of butter is two tablespoons. One ounce of grated Parmesan is roughly a scant half cup loosely packed, with about a third to a half cup for the Swiss -- a restrained dish by modern standards, and worth more cheese if you want it rich.
- "Place the pan on the fire"Low heat, and keep it moving. Parmesan and Swiss both break and go grainy over direct high heat; the pan should be warm enough to melt but never to bubble.
- Swiss cheeseRead this as Gruyère or Emmental in the wheel, not processed sandwich slices. It contributes the stretch that Parmesan alone will not give.
- YieldThree-quarters of a pound of pasta serves three as a main course or four to six as a first course.
Paysanne is French for "peasant style," and its appearance on an Italian pasta dish reflects the fact that French was the professional menu language of American hotel and restaurant kitchens around 1900. Pasta dressed simply with butter and grated cheese, without tomato, is an old way of eating pasta in Italy, and versions of it appear in Italian cookery long before tomato sauce became widespread. The pairing of aged Parmesan for salt and savor with a melting Alpine cheese for body suggests northern Italian or Ticinese practice rather than Neapolitan.