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Spaghetti and Tomatoes
Cook spaghetti in boiling salted water until tender. Drain and rinse. Put a layer of the spaghetti in a buttered baking dish. Cover it with a layer of tomato sauce made like White Sauce II, using strained canned tomatoes instead of milk. Dot with 1-inch cubes of bacon and onion, chopped fine. Repeat layers until dish is full. Cover with buttered crumbs and put in an oven and bake until hot throughout. A little grated cheese may be sprinkled on each layer of tomatoes if desired. 1/4 cup macaroni 1 1/3 cup white sauce
A plain baked pasta from a period when spaghetti was still filed under vegetables. The instructions assume you already know the book's White Sauce II, and the ingredient line at the end contradicts the title, so a little reconstruction is needed.
- White Sauce IIThe book's medium white sauce will be of the standard type, about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup liquid, cooked until thickened; check the book's own White Sauce II for its exact proportions. Here the liquid is strained canned tomatoes rather than milk — a roux-thickened tomato sauce, not a milk sauce with tomato added.
- Strained canned tomatoesWhole canned tomatoes pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seeds; nearest today to passata, or tomato purée in the British sense. Tomato paste is far too concentrated to stand in cup for cup, and American canned tomato purée is thicker than sieved tomatoes.
- The quantity line"1 cup macaroni, 1 cup white sauce" reads as a line carried over from a macaroni recipe, since the title says spaghetti. One cup dry pasta to one cup sauce is the ratio to keep; scale both together.
- Those bacon cubesOne-inch cubes of bacon are implausible for a dish this thin, and are almost certainly meant to be small dice. Cut the bacon to a quarter inch and render it in a pan before layering, or it will sit half-cooked between sheets of pasta.
- OnionThe raw chopped onion will not soften reliably in a dish that is only baked "until hot throughout." Sweat it in the bacon fat first.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 375F for 25 to 30 minutes, will heat it through and colour the crumbs.
- Rinsing, and undercookingRinsing is right here — it stops the cooking and prevents the layers gluing together before they reach the oven. Pull the spaghetti a minute or two short of tender, since it continues to absorb sauce in the dish.
- Buttered crumbsFresh breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a tablespoon of butter to half a cup of crumbs. Dried fine crumbs can scorch before the interior is hot.
- YieldOne cup of dry pasta with its sauce serves one or two as a main course, two or three as a side.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given away to policyholders as part of a campaign in which insurers, gas companies and flour millers distributed free domestic advice. That origin explains the tone: cheap ingredients, standard sauces cross-referenced by number, and no flourish. The instruction to boil until tender, drain and rinse — and the optional "little grated cheese" — marks the distance between this and the Italian-American cooking that would become familiar a generation later.