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Spaghetti, Polonaise
Plunge a half pound spaghetti in two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt and boil for twenty-five minutes. Drain on a sieve and place on a large dish. Have one ounce butter in a frying pan with three tablespoons fresh bread crumbs; toss well on the fire until the crumbs have attained a nice golden colour. Spread over the spaghetti and serve.
A two-ingredient dressing for pasta that lives or dies on the crumbs. The one number to ignore is the boiling time.
- Cooking timeTwenty-five minutes reflects a period when pasta was generally boiled until soft. Modern extruded spaghetti is done in 8 to 12 minutes; taste from minute eight and drain while there is still resistance.
- SaltA teaspoon in two quarts is mild. Salting the water more assertively matters in a dish this bare, as the pasta itself carries the seasoning.
- "Toss well on the fire"This means over direct heat on the stovetop, not near an open flame. Keep the butter and crumbs moving constantly over medium heat; the crumbs go from pale to burnt in well under a minute at the end.
- Fresh bread crumbsCrumbs torn or grated from day-old bread with the crust off, not the dry sandy packaged kind. Fresh crumbs brown unevenly into crisp irregular flakes, which is the point of the garnish.
- Butter quantityOne ounce is two tablespoons, just enough to coat three tablespoons of crumbs. If the crumbs look dry in the pan, add butter rather than raising the heat.
- DrainingDrain but do not rinse, and dress the pasta while it is hot enough to melt any butter clinging to the crumbs. Reserve a spoonful of the cooking water in case the drained spaghetti tightens up on the dish.
- YieldHalf a pound of pasta serves two as a main course or four as a side. Grated cheese and pepper at the table would not be out of place, though the recipe calls for neither.
Polonaise, or Polish-style, in the professional kitchen of this period meant one thing above all: browned butter crumbs. The full classical garniture adds sieved hard-boiled egg and chopped parsley and is most often seen on boiled cauliflower, asparagus or green beans, but the crumb-and-butter core travelled well and was applied to almost anything boiled and pale. The name is generally traced to the vogue for Polish cookery in French kitchens rather than to any single Polish dish, and buttered crumbs over noodles and dumplings is genuinely at home in Polish and Central European cooking. Its appearance here -- an Italian pasta dressed in a French garnish named for Poland -- shows how loosely those national labels sat.