January 4, 2024
Introduction: In this article – to help celebrate National Spaghetti Day – Gena Philibert-Ortega searches old newspapers to find recipes for this Italian favorite. Gena is a genealogist and author of the book “From the Family Kitchen.”
What’s your favorite Italian dish? Most likely if you’re not Italian you may have been introduced to the cuisine of Italy via spaghetti and meatballs. Spaghetti is so commonplace in the United States that my local grocery stores dedicate an entire aisle to various Italian pastas, as well as canned and jarred sauces.
To celebrate National Spaghetti Day today, let’s take a look at the dish and some recipes.
Nineteenth Century Mentions
The earliest advertisement for pasta in the United States (including spaghetti) that I found in GenealogyBank’s Historical Newspaper Archives was from 1865. It was published in the Courrier des Etats-Unis, a French-language newspaper from New York.
When do we find spaghetti recipes in the newspaper? Well, one of the first recipes I found that included a red sauce was in 1880. The Evening Star from Washington, D.C., under a column titled “The Household,” provided readers everything from a smallpox “cure” to recipes for “cheap waffles,” crullers, and spaghetti.
The spaghetti/sauce recipe:
Spaghetti. – This is a favorite dish at some of the best restaurants. The macaroni used should be the best Italian, and must be placed to boil in plenty of hot water. Let it cook ten or fifteen minutes, boiling hard all the while. When done it should retain some of its elasticity. If it lies perfectly flat, or sticks together, it has been too much cooked. A sauce for it is made by slowly boiling all the morning a piece of lean beefsteak (half a pound will suffice for a small family). To this you add enough canned or other tomatoes, an hour or so before serving, to give the sauce a rich red color. As much water only should be used as will leave the sauce rich and thick; this the cook will soon learn by experience. Let every one sprinkle grated Parmesan cheese on his spaghetti for himself.
While the above recipe doesn’t include meatballs, it does include beef. It also appears that it is referring to dried pasta instead of fresh. The first sentence of the recipe might be an indication that spaghetti in the United States was first made popular via restaurants before it became more commonplace.
Variations on a Theme
My guess is that most people enjoy their spaghetti with a red sauce like marinara, Bolognese or Pomodoro. However, there are those who like it with a white sauce. While spaghetti and meatballs seem to be an obvious pairing, the dish can include other types of meat or seafood.
This 1900 recipe is for Chicken with Spaghetti. The spaghetti and cream sauce are poured over the cooked chicken. Celery salt and paprika are used to season the dish.
Like many different foods, it’s not unusual to find a similar dish in other cultures. For example, in the United States we eat sandwiches and in Mexico they eat tortas. Here’s one recipe called Spaghetti Mexican Style. Most likely, it is not really an adaption of the Italian dish and instead harkens to a Spanish dish using fideo (spaghetti-like noodles) and tomato sauce. This “Mexican” style dish includes onions and tomatoes.
In some cases, you might not recognize the spaghetti dishes of your American ancestors, such as some of the recipes in this 1900 “Household” column from Springfield, Illinois.
This article began:
Spaghetti – akin to macaroni – is more delicate in flavor and more attractive in appearance than its coarser relative. It is delicious as a vegetable, entree or dessert, and in winter when green vegetables are few it serves to help the housewife over many a difficult spot in the daily menu.
You probably haven’t considered the “vegetable” or “dessert” qualities of spaghetti, and some of the suggested recipes might not be to your taste. Recipes include: Spaghetti with Swiss Cheese, which is basically cooked spaghetti with butter and melted Swiss cheese; Deviled Spaghetti, which includes a sauce made of “tomato catsup and tabasco sauce”; Spaghetti Strings, which is cooked, unbroken spaghetti with a tomato and butter sauce; and Spaghetti Roulettes that is fried and served with a cream sauce.
A note about the Spaghetti Strings recipe. Spaghetti is now packaged in 10- to 12-inch noodles – but that wasn’t always the case. So, cooking those unbroken noodles in that recipe might have involved cooking much larger noodles.
Spaghetti for Dinner
What are your spaghetti memories as a kid? When I was in high school, my hometown actually had a drive-thru spaghetti restaurant! You could pick up a bucket of spaghetti (like a bucket of fast-food fried chicken) and garlic bread for dinner. Whether you go out or stay in and cook your grandmother’s special spaghetti sauce recipe, I hope you enjoy National Spaghetti Day!
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Note on the header image: spaghetti and meatballs. Credit: TheCulinaryGeek; Wikimedia Commons.
