When I was a boy, I had to help milk the family's Jersey-cross cow. It was not homogenized or pasteurized. The bucket had to be sterilized, and the cow's udder had to be cleaned carefully. The raw milk was strained through a cloth filter assembly and cooled. The cream was allow to float to the top in a refrigerated jar, achieving some degree of separation. The cream was skimmed off, but not down to where the milk started -- that gave very thick cream. You still had to stir the remaining milk up after skimming the cream, since some cream still remained on top of the milk. My mother would often use the layer of part cream and part milk just like we would use "Half-and-Half" today. Maybe "top milk" just refers to that mixed layer on unhomogenized milk after the thickest cream is removed, so it would call for "Half-and-Half".
Your childhood is a rare treasure these days! Please pass this knowledge on as much as you can. (I grew up working in my dad's butcher shop. I never did any slaughtering, those days were already over when I was a kid, but I still feel like I know a trove more than most people.)
I too grew up drinking unpasteurized milk, from cows that I milked. We used a hand-cranked cream separator. Years later, my brother was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which is now thought to be related to drinking unpasteurized milk. Who knew?
I made this the same day I watched the video. Added pepper and grated parmesan. Swapped the onion for garlic and the green pepper and pimento for roasted red peppers. I used grated carrot and fresh peas. More grated cheese on top. I also used an enamel iron skillet to bake it in. Wow! Simple and delicious.
I used to frequent an “Italian” restaurant whihc served something very similar, made with ricotta and garlic infused olive oil. Served in slices with a good marinara on top and a grating of hard cheese.
That was one of my thoughts. I found a lunch menu from the ship, and there is a spaghetti dish on it. But it's called Spaghetti Napolitaine. For that dish, Google wanted to give me results for Napolitan spaghetti, most of which just use ketchup as a sauce or a Japanese sauce. But spelled correctly, I found a French language website for spaghetti Napolitaine that translated it to neapolitan and it wasn't cooked in a loaf, just had olive oil, black olives, tuna, and anchovies added to it.
There are a few obscure references to a recipe by the same name in a book of pasta recipes from hotel and ocean liner chefs - (a chef from the RMS Aquitania being among them).....So I would assume it somehow ended up in mainstream cookbooks from there..
It reminds me of a recipe my mother used to make from left-overs (already boiled noodles, slices of cooked ham) primarily in summer, when ripe tomatoes were available. It was before the time when tomatoes were in the stores all year round. In a small bowl make a royale from two eggs, with salt and pepper. Grease a casserole dish with butter and line with bread crumbs. Cut a few thin slices of cooked ham into little squares, cut an onion into thin slices. Cut the really ripe tomatoes into slices. Into the casserole dish put about half of the noodles, layer half of the tomatoes on top, sprinkle with pepper and oregano, add half of the onion slices, add all of the ham squares, the remainder of the onion, the remainder of the tomatoes. Spice the tomatoes with pepper and oregano. Fill the remainder of the noodles into the casserole. Pour in the royale, and bread crumbs on top and shavings of butter, bake in moderate oven until the bread crumbs are golden brown. Serve with a green salad on the side.
I'm looking forward to seeing more recipes from this cookbook. With gas prices climbing, I'm finding inexpensive staples like pastas really attractive as filling meals.
According to my grandmother, top milk was obtained AFTER you poured off the heavy cream. The next day there was a little cream on top of the milk, and when you poured that off it was like half and half or light coffee cream. That is what she called top milk.
Same here. And we called the churn milk “butter milk”. Imagine my disgust when as a four year old we were visiting a friend of my Mom’s and she offered me some butter milk. GHHHAAACCCKKK!!!
@@randallthomas5207question? Was what you drank the nasty stuff that they call buttermilk today or was it the liquid left from churning butter, which is essentially skim milk if the cream hadn't gotten sour? 😮
This makes perfect sense to me as someone born in the late 40s. We were Jewish, not Italian-American, but my mother’s kugel (noodle “pudding”) was a baked mixture of egg noodles, cottage cheese and egg. You eat it with a dollop of sour cream on top. (Lithuanian Jews, like my mother, made savory kugel and it was an ongoing epic battle with Galitzianer Jews who made a sweet kugel). Have to add that the cottage cheese and eggs in your recipe and my mother’s provides plenty of protein. No need to add anything!
Definitely a dish you could put damn near anything in and make it work. I love that sort of thing! Heck, after seeing how well it slices, I'm thinking a fried egg on top would be rather lovely!
This reminds me of a quick spinach pie, probably from the early 1970’s. Package of spinach, some bread, cottage cheese, eggs and Parmesan. Blend it up, bake in a well greased pan. Quiche-like but not fussy, and we all liked it, when I was a kid.
I have always found pasta and cottage cheese an acquired taste. My Grandmother always made her lasagna with it instead of ricotta, and to this day it’s the only way my dad will eat lasagna.
Maybe "Add the remaining ingredients in the order given and mix" meant mix after each addition. Mixing the egg in first would have coated the spaghetti first before the bread crumbs. A little sharp cheese might improve the flavor. This has real possibilities.
That's what I thought. But then, I always have a hard time getting cooked spaghetti (linguini, fettuccine, etc.) and and chunkier sauces to mix well. I also agree the recipe, as presented, is a great starting point for all sorts of variations.
I also profess my delight for the "Old Cookbook Show" on Sunday mornings! A nice goal for the week... I was thinking about why this recipe would be considered "Auquitania" and knew of a luxury liner by that name, as another commenter had suggested, but I'll offer up the southwest portion of France between the Pyrenees mountains and the Atlantic ocean. The Romans (who came and conquered in the 1st century BCE) called this "Gallia Aquitania", so this could have been a "use up the left-overs" dish that the marketing department for Caruso Pasta decided to give a nice Italian-sounding name. It's kind of like a frittata, but with very Americanized ingredients and cooking method.
I love it when cookbooks have a "history chapter", even if, in this case, it's not true history but what a lot of people still believe (in Italy they were already making pasta around the year 1000 AD).
This reminds me of the Soviet-style “zapekanka” that was served at my kindergarten. They’d use whole wheat flour spaghetti and it was brown. Children hated it. On the upside, I learned to love the soups given the alternative.))
My mom often made “spaghetti pie” which had a similar mixture as the “crust” and meat sauce as the filling along with ricotta or cottage cheese. There are a lot of versions of that out there on the cooking sites. Very tasty!
i find it hard to wrap my head around the fact of the long pasta cooking times in the past. if everyone was eating mushy (disintegrated?) noodles, how did pasta manage to gain popularity as a beloved food type? im glad someone figured it out along the way.
Maybe pasta wasn’t quite the same as it is now? If the variety of wheat was different, or noodles were thicker, then a longer cooking time may make sense. I know that one person in my family thinks brown rice pasta feels undercooked when it is no longer al dente. Then again, his parents grew up in the time of this cookbook so maybe he’s just used to overly soft pasta.
Modern pasta gets mushy much faster. You can see it today if you buy artisan Italian pasta versus most supermarket brands. The Amish also use noodles that don't get so mushy on soup versus your standard bag of "pa Dutch noodles) the big change is probably modern flour
Pasta isn't made the same way these days. I don't remember exactly if it's the flour available or something with the commercial process, but you really did have to boil pasta for loooong times pre1950.
Pasta manufacturing nowadays is very different from pre-1950, and our pasta is much thinner and smother than it used to be, which is why earlier cookbooks have longer cooking times. Changes in basic ingredients is why cookbooks have to be updated if you want the same finished dish as the original.
I was born in 1950. I lived in a small suburb and the local dairy delivered quarts of whole milk to our doorstep; that's why as soon as you said topcream I knew exactly what you were talking about. My mom would skim that cream off the tops of the quarts and save it for coffee. Another thing I remember is my dad's older sister's hand made pasta - no pasta machines back then. Mostly she made noodles which and they were thicker than we're accustomed to today. It took as good 20-25 minutes of boiling to soften them. Finally, I going to try this dish but pre-mix everything before adding the pasta. I'm thinking for a side dish maybe stewed tomatoes or salsa. Sounds good. thank you.
We had lots of cream, whole milk, butter, and churn milk when I was kid. We had so much milk, that Mom would make homemade cottage cheese out of it every third or fourth day, and I would feed it to the chickens.
It reminds me of a pasta dish I was served in a traditional Italian household with cannelloni pasta tubes, arranged upright in a baking dish, and covered/filled with a mixture of a soft cheese (ricotta, maybe?) and egg. It was baked, then cut into squares and served without a sauce.
I remember a few of the older Italians in my family making spaghetti pie back in the 60's and 70's. Eggs, ricotta, prosciutto, provolone cheese, hard boiled eggs, roasted red peppers. But this version from the cookbook is definitely an Americanized version, no Italian would use cottage cheese, at least none I knew.
Since it's from the 1940's, I wouldn't be surprised if ricotta would have been difficult to source outside of Italian immigrant neighborhoods at the time.
some of the recipes made with ricotta or nowadays cottage cheese were originally just made with bechamel, not cheese at all. such as lasagna. ricotta probably gained popularity due to thrift, as it can be made from the whey leftover from mozzarella. its not really the nose in the air traditional ingredient that most italians and chicagoans like to think.
@@bbear2695 Lasagna as commonly made in the US and Canada is descended from the Neapolitan style, which does use ricotta. Bechamel is from the Bolognese version.
This is a fine FAMILY-SIZED recipe! Serve it with a meat ragu on the side...or roast chicken. Use spinach for the green. DEFINITELY use RICOTTA instead of cottage cheese.
This also could be a healthier version of the usual savory pie that uses brisée or puff pastry by replacing it with a cooked spaghetti basket, don't know if you would need to blind bake them first
the Aquitania was a British ocean liner from 1918 to 1950 it was turned into hospital ship both in world war 1 and world war 2 This might have been a meatless meal because of the rationing of meat in wold war 2 So they gave it a fancy name or it may have been served on the Aqutania
The comfort food, "not challenging" concept reminds me of a session ale. For a lot of people, myself included, beer is a drink that, in its highest expression, is meant to be drunk in quantity. As much as I love a hoppy IPA, or a malty barley wine, for me beer is meant to be drunk in pints (preferably in quantities larger than 1). I'm a relative lightweight and so that means an ordinary bitter with low carbonation, mostly balanced malt and hops with just a slight tendency towards bitterness so as to cleanse your palate. Your last gulp of the third pint should be as delightful as the first gulp of the first pint. Not all beer is that way. For comfort food (at least for me), it's the same way. Its a food meant to be eaten in quantity. You take large mouthfuls from veritable mountains on your plate. The flavors are subtle so that you don't get tired of eating it. The texture is smooth and satisfying so that the last bite is as eagerly anticipated as the first. I don't always want to drink session ale, and I don't always want to eat comfort food. I think both categories can be looked down upon by certain cognescenti. It's important to realise that these are subtle and difficult to master areas of cooking. I love seeing these kinds of things and love seeing people enjoy them as much as I do :-)
I wonder if Aquitania refers to the liner ship RMS Aquitania -- either as an item featured on their menu (I couldn't find similar for that era with a quick scan) or as a way to provide some cache for a simple spaghetti dinner.
This loaf is very similar to one my mum made when I was a child. It was usually eaten cold, was made with macaroni and peanut butter with whatever veggies were on hand. I don't remember having cottage cheese or ricotta - we lived in an isolated part of Australia - so if she included cheese, it was most likely grated Kraft processed. Fond memories, thank you.
We grew up eating our spaghetti with one bowl of cooked noodles and one bowl of meat sauce at my father's insistence. At one of the family reunions as a young child there was a well seasoned "spaghetti loaf", no ground beef, and I haven't seen it since until this video. I remember liking it well enough but, could be in part the reason why we ate spaghetti the way we did.
My mother would make a spaghetti casserole with milk and eggs poured over cooked spaghetti in a 9x13 baking dish as a side for the Sunday pork roast. She seasoned with onions, salt, pepper, garlic, parsley, and cayenne. She'd take 3 slices of American cheese layer and cube them, and then sprinkle them around the mixture before baking. Pretty bland, but the cayenne and parsley helped.
Do you pronounce it like the Americans? Shall-uhts? We in the UK pronounce it like Glen did, very similar to the French word i presume it derives from échalote
Add the sauce(marinara, Bolognese, arabiata, agla y olio, red pepper sauce, meat sauce, etc)on top of the baked Spaghetti. Serve with meatballs and slalad, you have a meal!! Sprinkle with Toasted crushed nuts, bread crumbs and parmesan cheese mixture. Thanks Glenn and Julie, this recipe gave me a good idea for another way to use a loaf pan and a light spaghetti meal. And I was thinking top a slice of the.spaghetti lof with a fried egg.
I made this and really like it! I will try it again with different ingredients for sure! I mentioned you in my TH-cam experience making this. You are great!
Spaghetti loaf, I like the idea. You could use that as a framework for about anything. Shrimp and scallops? Love your old cookbook show. Thanks for all you do.
This reminds me of recipes I’ve seen for Kugel, a Jewish dish I believe? Someone please correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve baked leftover pasta and meat sauce before, though, topped with grated Parmesan cheese. Yummy!
When I forgot onions or in a hurry I use dried, minced onions, which I found in a shaker bottle in the spice section. They just need a few minutes to hydrate. Perfect substitution for a dish like this.
I'm thinking the carrots are mainly for color. You could leave them out. Diced sweet potato? Or maybe an orange/yellow pepper and some frozen peas? This is one of those recipes that you can add pretty much anything you like and skip anything you don't like. I think tuna or cubed chicken would be good in this.
I think it makes sense to add some tings in the given order if you mix it after any addition. If you just dump everything in, the order doesn't matter.
Add some leftover chicken, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and you have the version of chickenetti, that I grew up with! Usually followed up with a sugar cream or water pie. Would love to see Glen do some Depression Era pies.
That sounds interesting especially the pies. I wonder if your sugar cream pie is close to my French Canadian sugar pie, which is basically sugar and cream?
@@l.c.6282 I think they’re similar, though the one I had in Quebec City was made with brown sugar, where a Hoosier Sugar Cream (or Old Fashioned) is made with white sugar. We would have used brown sugar to make a Shoofly Pie.
Just found this channel. I enjoy trying foods from the past. I will be trying this soon. I think I will try to spit half spiced up and half plain, after hearing good base.
Pimento is good in a lot of things I make.. very mild tasting and add color in salads, dips and casseroles. My husband has problem with regular peppers, but roasted peppers and pimento he can eat.
I remember in 2nd grade (1977ish) my 2nd grade teacher telling us that her Mom used to freeze the cream that rose to the top of the milk because her family would eat it and how good it was. She was probably 50ish at the time. My little mind had no idea what she meant lol.
I listened to some folks years ago talk about Depression Era cooking, and this seems to be exactly that. And id try it. Im more curious about the pasta and Anchovy sauce though. Great show, thanks !!
@@marilyn1228 My friend is Italian and spoke of this from their youth. I need to just make it, idk why i havent. Thanks for reminding me. I always have anchovies on hand, theyre delicious.
This reminds me of an italian kugel..which as someone who is a Heinz 57 herself ...sounds like fusion I can get behind lol. My Nonna did make something like this but also used no meat...usually rapini,spinach and eggs
Looks great. Versatile with what veg you might have in frig. College roommate ate elbows with cottage cheese for lunch but this has extras. Never think of pasta pre-WW2 when GIs came home after tasting it in Italy. Will try this
My family did something similar. Only ricotta cheese and rotel tomatoes in the 70's as well as bits and bobs from the fridge including a meat usually ham or chicken or my personal worst as a kid.....tuna.
Sausages and apples are a fine thing. Good savoury sausage and sharp apples - delicious! Sometimes I roast sausage links with apple halves lovely Autumn dish.
I think a lot of Catholic moms made a dish something like this for Fridays. It was tough to cook relatively cheap suppers for Friday which were required to be meat free. My Mom’s version had tomato soup and Velveeta. Also had carrots, onions, and peas. Horrible, but warm, cheap and filled 7 hungry stomachs. She had several wonderful Friday meals but the good ones were not cheap so sometimes we got her “Baked Spaghetti “.
Top Milk - After you milk the cow and have strained it. You let it set overnight in the fridge(or in the spring house or in a bucket down in your cistern.) You skim off the cream on top, then the top 1/4 of the milk is the 'top milk'. That is used for drinking, cereal, or gravy. You might use some of the other in baking but most of it would be fed to the chickens or hogs. Top milk is basically half-n-half or a very light cream. Or at least that is how my family used and described it. From the SE corner of Kansas.
When the milkman delivered dairy in frigid weather the near frozen milk would expand and the top cream would push up the cap. It wasn't a twist type cap, more of a squeeze the edges around the bottle top. Don't forget to shake the bottle to mix the cream before use! When milk switched to paper cartons, my uncle would only drink milk from glass bottles because he "could taste the wax" from the paper containers.
This is interesting. I'd consider making this, but I'd substitute the cottage cheese for ricotta, put in both the green bell pepper and the parsley, and use minced roasted red pepper instead of the pimento. Also add some pepper, nutmeg, and parmesan or Romano.
When I was a boy, I had to help milk the family's Jersey-cross cow. It was not homogenized or pasteurized. The bucket had to be sterilized, and the cow's udder had to be cleaned carefully. The raw milk was strained through a cloth filter assembly and cooled. The cream was allow to float to the top in a refrigerated jar, achieving some degree of separation. The cream was skimmed off, but not down to where the milk started -- that gave very thick cream. You still had to stir the remaining milk up after skimming the cream, since some cream still remained on top of the milk. My mother would often use the layer of part cream and part milk just like we would use "Half-and-Half" today. Maybe "top milk" just refers to that mixed layer on unhomogenized milk after the thickest cream is removed, so it would call for "Half-and-Half".
I agree. Our milk in the early 50s was not homogenized and the top milk was cream, but not heavy cream.
That's what I was thinking.
Yep, that’s exactly what top milk is. Extra-rich but not quite half & half.
Your childhood is a rare treasure these days! Please pass this knowledge on as much as you can. (I grew up working in my dad's butcher shop. I never did any slaughtering, those days were already over when I was a kid, but I still feel like I know a trove more than most people.)
I too grew up drinking unpasteurized milk, from cows that I milked. We used a hand-cranked cream separator. Years later, my brother was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which is now thought to be related to drinking unpasteurized milk. Who knew?
Hey, that's one I sent! You're welcome, Glen. I'm glad you found a comfort food base recipe from it. Those corporate brand cookbooks are amusing.
Thx !! You should be pinned on this.
I made this the same day I watched the video. Added pepper and grated parmesan. Swapped the onion for garlic and the green pepper and pimento for roasted red peppers. I used grated carrot and fresh peas. More grated cheese on top. I also used an enamel iron skillet to bake it in. Wow! Simple and delicious.
You forgot the almonds :P
Gonna have to try this!!
Nothing says Sunday mornin like the old cookbook show!
I used to frequent an “Italian” restaurant whihc served something very similar, made with ricotta and garlic infused olive oil. Served in slices with a good marinara on top and a grating of hard cheese.
Yum
There was an ocean liner named Aquitania. Maybe this is a take on one of their dishes.
Interesting 🤔🧐
That was one of my thoughts. I found a lunch menu from the ship, and there is a spaghetti dish on it. But it's called Spaghetti Napolitaine. For that dish, Google wanted to give me results for Napolitan spaghetti, most of which just use ketchup as a sauce or a Japanese sauce. But spelled correctly, I found a French language website for spaghetti Napolitaine that translated it to neapolitan and it wasn't cooked in a loaf, just had olive oil, black olives, tuna, and anchovies added to it.
I was just about to mention the ship when I saw your comment...
"Aquitania", aka Aquitaine, is also an historical region in southwestern France.
There are a few obscure references to a recipe by the same name in a book of pasta recipes from hotel and ocean liner chefs - (a chef from the RMS Aquitania being among them).....So I would assume it somehow ended up in mainstream cookbooks from there..
It reminds me of a recipe my mother used to make from left-overs (already boiled noodles, slices of cooked ham) primarily in summer, when ripe tomatoes were available. It was before the time when tomatoes were in the stores all year round.
In a small bowl make a royale from two eggs, with salt and pepper. Grease a casserole dish with butter and line with bread crumbs. Cut a few thin slices of cooked ham into little squares, cut an onion into thin slices. Cut the really ripe tomatoes into slices. Into the casserole dish put about half of the noodles, layer half of the tomatoes on top, sprinkle with pepper and oregano, add half of the onion slices, add all of the ham squares, the remainder of the onion, the remainder of the tomatoes. Spice the tomatoes with pepper and oregano. Fill the remainder of the noodles into the casserole. Pour in the royale, and bread crumbs on top and shavings of butter, bake in moderate oven until the bread crumbs are golden brown. Serve with a green salad on the side.
Sounds WONDERFUL!
Yum!!
Nope!
I'm looking forward to seeing more recipes from this cookbook. With gas prices climbing, I'm finding inexpensive staples like pastas really attractive as filling meals.
This comment all day! SIngle mom of four teens and cannot handle 400/wk for groceries...pasta dishes are thankfully always a winner here
@@MamaStyles There are some good pantry recipes on this channel too!
According to my grandmother, top milk was obtained AFTER you poured off the heavy cream. The next day there was a little cream on top of the milk, and when you poured that off it was like half and half or light coffee cream. That is what she called top milk.
Same here. And we called the churn milk “butter milk”. Imagine my disgust when as a four year old we were visiting a friend of my Mom’s and she offered me some butter milk. GHHHAAACCCKKK!!!
@@randallthomas5207question? Was what you drank the nasty stuff that they call buttermilk today or was it the liquid left from churning butter, which is essentially skim milk if the cream hadn't gotten sour? 😮
This makes perfect sense to me as someone born in the late 40s. We were Jewish, not Italian-American, but my mother’s kugel (noodle “pudding”) was a baked mixture of egg noodles, cottage cheese and egg. You eat it with a dollop of sour cream on top. (Lithuanian Jews, like my mother, made savory kugel and it was an ongoing epic battle with Galitzianer Jews who made a sweet kugel).
Have to add that the cottage cheese and eggs in your recipe and my mother’s provides plenty of protein. No need to add anything!
@@Ea-Nasir_Copper_Co sounds like kugel
I like both.
Definitely a dish you could put damn near anything in and make it work. I love that sort of thing! Heck, after seeing how well it slices, I'm thinking a fried egg on top would be rather lovely!
The old cookbook show is my favourite 😁 I think this could be a hit with kids.. even cold with salad on a hot day. Yup.. I'd definitely eat this. 👍
Yes, cold. I was picturing myself pulling it out of the fridge, cutting a slide, and enjoying with a nice crisp glass of white wine. Maybe two slices.
This reminds me of a quick spinach pie, probably from the early 1970’s.
Package of spinach, some bread, cottage cheese, eggs and Parmesan.
Blend it up, bake in a well greased pan. Quiche-like but not fussy, and we all liked it, when I was a kid.
I have always found pasta and cottage cheese an acquired taste. My Grandmother always made her lasagna with it instead of ricotta, and to this day it’s the only way my dad will eat lasagna.
My Italian grand mother would use cottage cheese in her lasagna
Yeah, I've had lasagne sometimes made with pot cheese - just not my thing. I'd rather use ricotta.
ATK (American Test Kitchen) prefers cottage vs ricotta in lasagna, melts smoother.
@@perrijohnson9627 I use a little of both, ricotta and cottage cheese
So cool to see the photos of opera star Enrico Caruso on the labels of those pictures in the cookbook. ❤️
I always look forward to this show especially each week!
Hmm Top milk :-) As kids we would fight over The top of the Milk for out breakfast cereals ( In the UK delivered in pint bottles)
Maybe "Add the remaining ingredients in the order given and mix" meant mix after each addition. Mixing the egg in first would have coated the spaghetti first before the bread crumbs. A little sharp cheese might improve the flavor. This has real possibilities.
I agree skip the nuts and add some Parmesan cheese
That's what I thought. But then, I always have a hard time getting cooked spaghetti (linguini, fettuccine, etc.) and and chunkier sauces to mix well. I also agree the recipe, as presented, is a great starting point for all sorts of variations.
Ricotta for creaminess, Parmesan for flavor. As for sauce, I like the idea of slicing it and pouring sauce over the top.
Greetings from Melbourne Australia ❤️❤️❤️
I like your show my grandmother made something similar to that. Had Beans and mushrooms in it.
I had a similar dish while at a scouting camp, made with cheese, macaroni, eggs, bacon, and breadcrumbs! It was pretty good.
Spaghetti on a Sunday sounds great 😊
I have that cookbook!
I also profess my delight for the "Old Cookbook Show" on Sunday mornings! A nice goal for the week... I was thinking about why this recipe would be considered "Auquitania" and knew of a luxury liner by that name, as another commenter had suggested, but I'll offer up the southwest portion of France between the Pyrenees mountains and the Atlantic ocean. The Romans (who came and conquered in the 1st century BCE) called this "Gallia Aquitania", so this could have been a "use up the left-overs" dish that the marketing department for Caruso Pasta decided to give a nice Italian-sounding name. It's kind of like a frittata, but with very Americanized ingredients and cooking method.
I love your show, especially all the old recipes (some of which I grew up on)!
This is like a version of savoury koogle.
I love it when cookbooks have a "history chapter", even if, in this case, it's not true history but what a lot of people still believe (in Italy they were already making pasta around the year 1000 AD).
This reminds me of the Soviet-style “zapekanka” that was served at my kindergarten. They’d use whole wheat flour spaghetti and it was brown. Children hated it. On the upside, I learned to love the soups given the alternative.))
Perfect for the left over pasta! (I tend to cook the whole box.) TY, fun.
I'm all about garlic and shallots. I definitely would have used both in this.
My mom often made “spaghetti pie” which had a similar mixture as the “crust” and meat sauce as the filling along with ricotta or cottage cheese. There are a lot of versions of that out there on the cooking sites. Very tasty!
i find it hard to wrap my head around the fact of the long pasta cooking times in the past. if everyone was eating mushy (disintegrated?) noodles, how did pasta manage to gain popularity as a beloved food type? im glad someone figured it out along the way.
Maybe pasta wasn’t quite the same as it is now? If the variety of wheat was different, or noodles were thicker, then a longer cooking time may make sense. I know that one person in my family thinks brown rice pasta feels undercooked when it is no longer al dente. Then again, his parents grew up in the time of this cookbook so maybe he’s just used to overly soft pasta.
Modern pasta gets mushy much faster. You can see it today if you buy artisan Italian pasta versus most supermarket brands. The Amish also use noodles that don't get so mushy on soup versus your standard bag of "pa Dutch noodles) the big change is probably modern flour
Pasta isn't made the same way these days. I don't remember exactly if it's the flour available or something with the commercial process, but you really did have to boil pasta for loooong times pre1950.
Pasta manufacturing nowadays is very different from pre-1950, and our pasta is much thinner and smother than it used to be, which is why earlier cookbooks have longer cooking times. Changes in basic ingredients is why cookbooks have to be updated if you want the same finished dish as the original.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was denser and absolutely rock hard back then.
Weird recipe but fun to see you guys approaching eating it!
I was born in 1950. I lived in a small suburb and the local dairy delivered quarts of whole milk to our doorstep; that's why as soon as you said topcream I knew exactly what you were talking about. My mom would skim that cream off the tops of the quarts and save it for coffee. Another thing I remember is my dad's older sister's hand made pasta - no pasta machines back then. Mostly she made noodles which and they were thicker than we're accustomed to today. It took as good 20-25 minutes of boiling to soften them. Finally, I going to try this dish but pre-mix everything before adding the pasta. I'm thinking for a side dish maybe stewed tomatoes or salsa. Sounds good. thank you.
Kind of like tetrazzini, looks good 👍
Reminds of savory kugel.
My friend said when she was little she would get up early so she could get the cream off the top of the milk for her cereal before anyone else did.😄
Guilty
We had lots of cream, whole milk, butter, and churn milk when I was kid. We had so much milk, that Mom would make homemade cottage cheese out of it every third or fourth day, and I would feed it to the chickens.
My grandfather made something very similar and ate it between thick slices of buttered Italian bread.
It reminds me of a pasta dish I was served in a traditional Italian household with cannelloni pasta tubes, arranged upright in a baking dish, and covered/filled with a mixture of a soft cheese (ricotta, maybe?) and egg. It was baked, then cut into squares and served without a sauce.
Was it tasty
It was relatively bland, but not unpleasant.
Julie being so shocked by the nuts being sprinkled on top of it that she forgot to say "Hey Glenm hey friends!". :D
This is almost exactly like my grandmother's "Pavrotti". She used a whole dozen eggs though. We all loved it!
Todays offering was worth just for the definition of "top milk"! But the rest of the video was as always fun.
I can see a thick slice whith cheese on top in the oven 10 minutes 200°C. 🤩🤩
Glen, you and your wife seem like such a great match!
I’m sure, in the 40’s, when so many “cooks” had to make something out of nothing and trying to get a lot out of a little bit, this recipe was AMAZING.
🤗 I love that we send you cookbooks. The sausage and apple recipe intrigues me
I remember a few of the older Italians in my family making spaghetti pie back in the 60's and 70's. Eggs, ricotta, prosciutto, provolone cheese, hard boiled eggs, roasted red peppers. But this version from the cookbook is definitely an Americanized version, no Italian would use cottage cheese, at least none I knew.
Since it's from the 1940's, I wouldn't be surprised if ricotta would have been difficult to source outside of Italian immigrant neighborhoods at the time.
some of the recipes made with ricotta or nowadays cottage cheese were originally just made with bechamel, not cheese at all. such as lasagna. ricotta probably gained popularity due to thrift, as it can be made from the whey leftover from mozzarella. its not really the nose in the air traditional ingredient that most italians and chicagoans like to think.
@@bbear2695 Lasagna as commonly made in the US and Canada is descended from the Neapolitan style, which does use ricotta. Bechamel is from the Bolognese version.
I'm intrigued and will give this one a try.
My irish grandmother made spaghetti very much like this. She lived in NY, so she may have had this very cookbook. My dad called this Irish spaghetti.
This is a fine FAMILY-SIZED recipe! Serve it with a meat ragu on the side...or roast chicken. Use spinach for the green. DEFINITELY use RICOTTA instead of cottage cheese.
This also could be a healthier version of the usual savory pie that uses brisée or puff pastry by replacing it with a cooked spaghetti basket, don't know if you would need to blind bake them first
Yeah, with ricotta I might dig it. As is with pot cheese...not really.
Thanks for the Sunday content old friend. Hope its a peaceful Sunday for you. Looks tasty.
Very interesting! My 91 YO mother grew up eating homemade cottage cheese with a little grated carrot mixed in.
the Aquitania was a British ocean liner from 1918 to 1950 it was turned into hospital ship both in world war 1 and world war 2 This might have been a meatless meal because of the rationing of meat in wold war 2 So they gave it a fancy name or it may have been served on the Aqutania
First... This looks interesting. I will have to make it. Thank you for the channel. It's what I look forward to on a Sunday.
The comfort food, "not challenging" concept reminds me of a session ale. For a lot of people, myself included, beer is a drink that, in its highest expression, is meant to be drunk in quantity. As much as I love a hoppy IPA, or a malty barley wine, for me beer is meant to be drunk in pints (preferably in quantities larger than 1). I'm a relative lightweight and so that means an ordinary bitter with low carbonation, mostly balanced malt and hops with just a slight tendency towards bitterness so as to cleanse your palate. Your last gulp of the third pint should be as delightful as the first gulp of the first pint. Not all beer is that way.
For comfort food (at least for me), it's the same way. Its a food meant to be eaten in quantity. You take large mouthfuls from veritable mountains on your plate. The flavors are subtle so that you don't get tired of eating it. The texture is smooth and satisfying so that the last bite is as eagerly anticipated as the first.
I don't always want to drink session ale, and I don't always want to eat comfort food. I think both categories can be looked down upon by certain cognescenti. It's important to realise that these are subtle and difficult to master areas of cooking. I love seeing these kinds of things and love seeing people enjoy them as much as I do :-)
I wonder if Aquitania refers to the liner ship RMS Aquitania -- either as an item featured on their menu (I couldn't find similar for that era with a quick scan) or as a way to provide some cache for a simple spaghetti dinner.
This loaf is very similar to one my mum made when I was a child. It was usually eaten cold, was made with macaroni and peanut butter with whatever veggies were on hand. I don't remember having cottage cheese or ricotta - we lived in an isolated part of Australia - so if she included cheese, it was most likely grated Kraft processed. Fond memories, thank you.
The simplicity of another era. Glad I caught this episode. Will try this one for sure!!
We grew up eating our spaghetti with one bowl of cooked noodles and one bowl of meat sauce at my father's insistence. At one of the family reunions as a young child there was a well seasoned "spaghetti loaf", no ground beef, and I haven't seen it since until this video. I remember liking it well enough but, could be in part the reason why we ate spaghetti the way we did.
My mother would make a spaghetti casserole with milk and eggs poured over cooked spaghetti in a 9x13 baking dish as a side for the Sunday pork roast. She seasoned with onions, salt, pepper, garlic, parsley, and cayenne. She'd take 3 slices of American cheese layer and cube them, and then sprinkle them around the mixture before baking. Pretty bland, but the cayenne and parsley helped.
On behalf of all Canadians...we don't normally say "shallot" the way Glenn just did! Sounds like my grandfather up there! (with love!)
Do you pronounce it like the Americans? Shall-uhts? We in the UK pronounce it like Glen did, very similar to the French word i presume it derives from échalote
I'm Canadian (a little older than Glenn I think) and I grew up pronouncing shallots the way he did. Like the French but without the "e".
Add the sauce(marinara, Bolognese, arabiata, agla y olio, red pepper sauce, meat sauce, etc)on top of the baked
Spaghetti. Serve with meatballs and slalad, you have a meal!! Sprinkle with
Toasted crushed nuts, bread crumbs and parmesan cheese mixture. Thanks Glenn and Julie, this recipe gave me a good idea for another way to use a loaf pan and a light spaghetti meal. And I was thinking top a slice of the.spaghetti lof with a fried egg.
This is a great recipe base for all sorts of additions and variations on a theme, thanks for this.
I made this and really like it! I will try it again with different ingredients for sure! I mentioned you in my TH-cam experience making this. You are great!
I think this is the first time ever that Jules has come onto the set and not said "Hello Glen, hello friends"
That looks good!
Very similar to a Sicilian frittata of eggs, leftover speghetti and parmesan cheese. Mixed and fried and sliced, and served cool.
Spaghetti loaf, I like the idea. You could use that as a framework for about anything. Shrimp and scallops? Love your old cookbook show. Thanks for all you do.
In America, this is spaghetti pie, a pretty common dish. We tend to add ground beef, spaghetti sauce and more cheese. Yummy! :)
Fascinating!
I could definitely see myself making this but maybe adding some shredded/diced chicken and some spinach
And some mushrooms too.
sounds good, ground turkey was my thought.
Sounds very familiar in the US upper Midwest. We just called it spaghetti casserole or spaghetti loaf.
Definitely going to try this!!
Recipe above looks interesting as well!
This reminds me of recipes I’ve seen for Kugel, a Jewish dish I believe? Someone please correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve baked leftover pasta and meat sauce before, though, topped with grated Parmesan cheese. Yummy!
It looks so good.
When I forgot onions or in a hurry I use dried, minced onions, which I found in a shaker bottle in the spice section. They just need a few minutes to hydrate. Perfect substitution for a dish like this.
I LOVE your spaghetti basket! I just found your channel and subscribed. You are so kind-hearted, funny, and engaging. :-)
I will have to think of a substitute for the carrots because I am allergic, but the rest looks really good. The scrape of forks is always a good sign!
Yellow or orange bell pepper, maybe?
I'm thinking the carrots are mainly for color. You could leave them out. Diced sweet potato? Or maybe an orange/yellow pepper and some frozen peas? This is one of those recipes that you can add pretty much anything you like and skip anything you don't like. I think tuna or cubed chicken would be good in this.
Sweet potatoes? Squash?
“Fork don’t lie”
I think it makes sense to add some tings in the given order if you mix it after any addition. If you just dump everything in, the order doesn't matter.
As a born and raised New Yorker, we had some pretty weird foods. We were a true melting pot for over 150 years now. Really cool cookbook.
My wife and I love to make spaghetti pie!
Similar to what was made here
Add some leftover chicken, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and you have the version of chickenetti, that I grew up with! Usually followed up with a sugar cream or water pie. Would love to see Glen do some Depression Era pies.
I made a sugar cream pie recently and I really liked it! Had never heard of it and ran across a recipe for it.
That sounds interesting especially the pies. I wonder if your sugar cream pie is close to my French Canadian sugar pie, which is basically sugar and cream?
@@l.c.6282 I think they’re similar, though the one I had in Quebec City was made with brown sugar, where a Hoosier Sugar Cream (or Old Fashioned) is made with white sugar. We would have used brown sugar to make a Shoofly Pie.
That is a fascinating cook book! I wish I could find a copy, I'd probably run through most of the recipes in it.
Same, keep looking but haven’t found a copy yet.
What a delightfully easy recipe, Thank You for sharing 🍽
Just found this channel. I enjoy trying foods from the past. I will be trying this soon. I think I will try to spit half spiced up and half plain, after hearing good base.
I notice pimento is used a lot in these old recipes. I never once buy them ever in Canadian grocery.
Pimento is good in a lot of things I make.. very mild tasting and add color in salads, dips and casseroles. My husband has problem with regular peppers, but roasted peppers and pimento he can eat.
I completely understand the "not challenging" aspect of a dish. Not sure I could articulate it to someone else either, but I get it.
I remember in 2nd grade (1977ish) my 2nd grade teacher telling us that her Mom used to freeze the cream that rose to the top of the milk because her family would eat it and how good it was. She was probably 50ish at the time. My little mind had no idea what she meant lol.
I listened to some folks years ago talk about Depression Era cooking, and this seems to be exactly that. And id try it.
Im more curious about the pasta and Anchovy sauce though. Great show, thanks !!
I LOVE anchovies, have you ever tried Bagna cauda as a vegetable dipping sauce? OMG!!
@@marilyn1228 My friend is Italian and spoke of this from their youth. I need to just make it, idk why i havent. Thanks for reminding me.
I always have anchovies on hand, theyre delicious.
This reminds me of an italian kugel..which as someone who is a Heinz 57 herself ...sounds like fusion I can get behind lol. My Nonna did make something like this but also used no meat...usually rapini,spinach and eggs
Looks great. Versatile with what veg you might have in frig. College roommate ate elbows with cottage cheese for lunch but this has extras. Never think of pasta pre-WW2 when GIs came home after tasting it in Italy. Will try this
My family did something similar. Only ricotta cheese and rotel tomatoes in the 70's as well as bits and bobs from the fridge including a meat usually ham or chicken or my personal worst as a kid.....tuna.
The recipe above in the book of spaghetti with sausage and apples seems interesting too!
I thought it seemed weird and random. Why put those two things together? Individually they're both good but I wouldn't eat them together.
Sausages and apples are a fine thing. Good savoury sausage and sharp apples - delicious! Sometimes I roast sausage links with apple halves lovely Autumn dish.
This does look interesting and it looks good and I understand what Glen's saying about a basic comfort food. A little like a hugel with vegetables
Assuming you meant kugel, I agree completely. I described my Litvak mother’s savory milchig kugel in another comment.
@@TamarLitvot I was trying to say kugel. I will check out the other comments
@@dianatennant4346 Having had many many typos in many many comments myself, I figured that's what you were saying!
I think a lot of Catholic moms made a dish something like this for Fridays. It was tough to cook relatively cheap suppers for Friday which were required to be meat free. My Mom’s version had tomato soup and Velveeta. Also had carrots, onions, and peas. Horrible, but warm, cheap and filled 7 hungry stomachs. She had several wonderful Friday meals but the good ones were not cheap so sometimes we got her “Baked Spaghetti “.
Nice!
Top Milk - After you milk the cow and have strained it. You let it set overnight in the fridge(or in the spring house or in a bucket down in your cistern.) You skim off the cream on top, then the top 1/4 of the milk is the 'top milk'. That is used for drinking, cereal, or gravy. You might use some of the other in baking but most of it would be fed to the chickens or hogs. Top milk is basically half-n-half or a very light cream. Or at least that is how my family used and described it. From the SE corner of Kansas.
When the milkman delivered dairy in frigid weather the near frozen milk would expand and the top cream would push up the cap. It wasn't a twist type cap, more of a squeeze the edges around the bottle top.
Don't forget to shake the bottle to mix the cream before use!
When milk switched to paper cartons, my uncle would only drink milk from glass bottles because he "could taste the wax" from the paper containers.
This is interesting. I'd consider making this, but I'd substitute the cottage cheese for ricotta, put in both the green bell pepper and the parsley, and use minced roasted red pepper instead of the pimento. Also add some pepper, nutmeg, and parmesan or Romano.