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Sauce for Italian Macaroni
One-quarter of a pound of salt pork, an onion chopped very fine with it, and fry until thoroughly done. Then add half can of tomatoes, a carrot cut fine and a little parsley. Let all boil together three-quarters of an hour, strain, and if too thin, add a very little flour. To a package of spaghetti, allow half a pound of butter, melted, half a pound of Parmesan cheese, grated. Arrange spaghetti or macaroni in layers, dressing each with butter and cheese. Pour the sauce over it or serve separately.
A soffritto-based tomato sauce built on salt pork, with the pasta dressed in the older Italian-American manner: layered with butter and cheese rather than tossed with the sauce. A few of the quantities need scaling before you cook.
- Cut the butter and cheeseHalf a pound of butter and half a pound of Parmesan to one package of pasta is roughly double what most cooks want now. Four ounces of butter and four to six ounces of grated cheese to a pound of spaghetti gives a rich result without the pasta swimming.
- "Half a can of tomatoes"Canned tomatoes came in a range of sizes, several of them larger than today's standard tin, so there is no exact equivalent. Start with about a cup to a cup and a half of tomatoes with their juice and add more to taste; whole peeled tomatoes crushed by hand are nearer the original than pre-diced.
- A package of spaghettiPackage weights varied, so there is no fixed equivalent. Reading it as one pound is a reasonable working assumption.
- Salt porkUnsmoked cured pork belly or fatback, sold in slabs near the bacon. Pancetta is the closest common substitute; if you use bacon, the smoke will dominate. Dice it small so it renders before the onion catches.
- Salt lastBetween the pork and the Parmesan the dish carries a lot of salt already. Season only after straining, and taste again once the cheese is on.
- The straining stepForty-five minutes of simmering is there to break down the carrot and onion into the sauce; the strainer catches the pork and fibre. Press the solids hard against the sieve so you keep the body, otherwise you will be reaching for the flour.
- ThickeningIf you do need flour, whisk a teaspoon into a little cold water first and stir it into the simmering sauce, then give it two or three minutes to lose the raw taste. Reducing the sauce uncovered for a few minutes usually does the job without it.
- LayeringWork quickly with hot drained pasta in a warmed dish, alternating pasta, melted butter and cheese. It cools fast in shallow layers, and the cheese will not melt into the strands if the pasta has gone tepid.
- YieldA pound of pasta with this sauce serves four generously as a main course, six as a first course.
The dish is a plausible snapshot of how Italian food reached American kitchens in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century: a sauce built on salt pork rather than olive oil, tomatoes from a can, and pasta dressed in layers with butter and Parmesan and the sauce poured over or "served separately." That last option may reflect an Anglo-American habit of treating pasta as a starch with gravy alongside, rather than the Italian practice of finishing the pasta in its sauce. Grated Parmesan was an established import in American cities by this period, and "macaroni" still served as a general term for dried pasta shapes, which is why spaghetti and macaroni are offered interchangeably in the same sentence.