Home › Meats › Roast with Spaghetti
Roast with Spaghetti
2 tablespoonfuls flour 3 lbs. sirloin steak 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 large onion ¼ lb. bacon Salt and pepper to taste 1/2 cupful water 1/2 can tomatoes 1 cupful cooked peas 1 cupful cooked spaghetti 1 cupful cooked mushrooms 8 stuffed olives Melt Crisco and make very hot in roasting pan, lay in steak, season with salt and pepper, cover with layer of sliced onion, layer of bacon, add Meats water, cover, and cook in moderate oven about three hours. Have ready peas, mushrooms, and spaghetti. Place meat on hot platter. Add juice of tomatoes to gravy, and flour moistened with a little cold water, peas and mushrooms, and when hot pour round meat. Spread spaghetti on top and decorate with olives.
A braise dressed up as a roast: three pounds of sirloin cooked slowly under onion and bacon, then finished with a tomato gravy and a garnish of spaghetti, peas and olives. The vessel matters more than the oven here.
- Use a lidded pot, not an open panThe dish is covered and moistened with only half a cup of water, so it is a braise. A Dutch oven or heavy casserole with a tight lid holds the steam; an uncovered roasting pan will dry the meat out long before three hours are up.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 325-350F. At the lower end the three hours given is about right for a thick sirloin cut braised to sliceable tenderness.
- Choice of cut"Sirloin steak" in a three-pound piece meant a thick block from the sirloin, not the thin modern steak. A boneless chuck roast or top sirloin roast of the same weight behaves better over three hours; a lean modern steak cut an inch thick would be ruined in one.
- CriscoThe book's whole purpose is to sell hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and two tablespoons of any neutral high-smoke-point fat does the same job. Beef dripping or oil is fine.
- Half a can of tomatoesPeriod tomato cans varied and were generally larger than a modern pint tin, so half a can is likely somewhere between one and two cups. The recipe asks only for the juice; drain the tomatoes and keep the solids for another use, or add them if you want a thicker gravy.
- ThickeningTwo tablespoons of flour slaked in cold water will lightly bind about two cups of liquid. Whisk it into the simmering pan juices and let it cook a couple of minutes to lose the raw taste before the vegetables go in.
- The garnish is assembly, not cookingPeas, mushrooms and spaghetti all go in already cooked and only need heating through. Boil the spaghetti a minute short so it does not slump on the hot platter.
- YieldThree pounds of meat with the vegetable and pasta garnish serves six to eight.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter and Gamble in the 1910s to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no culinary tradition behind it: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a clean, shelf-stable stand-in for lard and butter. Recipes like this one show the strategy plainly, since the Crisco does almost nothing that any other fat would not do, but its name sits at the head of the ingredient list. The dish itself belongs to a fashion of the period for serving a plain roast on a platter ringed with made-up garnishes, and the spaghetti here is treated exactly as the peas and olives are, as decoration for the meat rather than a course in its own right. Such treatment of pasta is often said to have been typical of American kitchens before the Italian-American restaurant kitchen reshaped it, and the stuffed olives around the edge suggest something of the same period taste.