Home › Luncheon › Spaghetti Italian
Spaghetti Italian
1 pound spaghetti 1 can tomatoes 2 cloves garlic 1/2 cup Mazola 2 tablespoons Karo, Red Label 1 tablespoon Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Salt and pepper to taste Put the spaghetti on to cook in plenty of boiling salted water. Allow thirty minutes. In the meantime, cut the garlic in bits, Mazola As a Shortening AZOLA is pure water.
In using Mazola in other recipes reduce each cupful two tablespoonfuls.
Be- During the course of a year this alone means a saving of considerable money. sides, Mazola-shortened Foods are truly deli cious, and very easily and quickly made. fry till yellowed in the Mazola, add the tomato and Karo and cook until the spaghetti is done; then rub the sauce through a sieve, thicken with the cornstarch blended with one tablespoon cold water and season to taste with salt and pepper.
Put the spaghetti in a bowl or on a deep platter, flat pour the sauce over, and serve with grated Parmesan or American cheese.
Spaghetti Italian with
A corn-products promotional recipe from the era when branded oil, syrup and cornstarch were sold as a single system. The method is sound, but the timings and the sweetener belong to their moment.
- Thirty minutes is far too longModern dried spaghetti cooks in 8-11 minutes. Cook to the package time, taste for bite, and drain.
- The brand namesMazola is corn oil; any neutral oil or olive oil works. Argo and Kingsford's are cornstarch. Karo Red Label was one of several graded Karo corn syrups of the period and should not be assumed identical to any single modern Karo product.
- The syrupTwo tablespoons of corn syrup will soften the acidity of canned tomatoes. A teaspoon of sugar does the same job; taste the sauce first, since good canned tomatoes may need nothing.
- The can of tomatoesPeriod cans were generally smaller than today's largest sizes. A 14- to 16-ounce can is the closest match to what the recipe assumes; a larger can will simply give more sauce for the pound of spaghetti.
- Sieving and thickeningPassing the sauce through a sieve gives the smooth, uniform texture the period preferred. If you skip it, skip the cornstarch too, since a sauce simmered down needs no starch to hold it.
- Half a cup of oilThat is a great deal of fat for one pound of pasta by current taste. Two to three tablespoons is enough to fry the garlic and carry the sauce.
- GarlicFry it only until pale gold. Corn oil runs hot and browned garlic turns bitter, which will show plainly in a sauce this simple.
- YieldA pound of spaghetti with this quantity of sauce serves four to six as a luncheon dish.
This comes from a genre of cookbook that was really an advertisement bound as a manual: the Corn Products Refining Company published collections promoting Mazola oil, Karo syrup and Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch together, with each recipe engineered to use as many of the three as possible, which is why corn syrup and cornstarch turn up in a tomato sauce that needs neither. The dish itself reflects how Italian food reached the American middle-class table, smoothed into a sieved, thickened sauce. The instruction to serve with "grated Parmesan or American cheese" is telling: imported Parmesan was a specialty item, and domestic hard cheese was the assumed everyday substitute for a cook who had probably never eaten the dish in Italy.