Herbed Spaghetti: or, This is why we are all obsessed with pasta

Sometimes, the best things are simple and buttery.

Herbed Spaghetti 1 pound thin spaghetti 4 to 6 cloves garlic, pressed or finely minced 3 tbsp olive oil ½ cup butter, melted 1 cup fresh herbs, chopped (chives, parsley, dill, green onion tops) Salt to taste Cook the spaghetti in salted water until done. While the spaghetti is cooking, saute the garlic in the oil until golden. Remove from heat. Add butter, herbs, and salt. After draining the spaghetti, toss it with the herbs. Serve immediately. Serves 6.     Herbed Pasta with Mushrooms: Quarter all ingredient amounts. Instead of spaghetti, use pasta shells, corkscrews, or any other noodle shape that is suitable for mixing with chunky things. (With spaghetti or any other string-type pasta, the mushrooms will never quite mix in.) Saute the garlic in the olive oil (just like the original recipe). After the garlic is golden, add 8 oz of sliced mushrooms to the frying pan. Saute the mushrooms until done. Then slowly add about 2 tablespoons of flour to thicken the pan juices, stirring very fast to prevent lumps. Stir in the butter and herbs. When the butter is melted and all is mixed, remove from heat. Mix with the hot, drained noodles and serve immediately. Note: If you're not serving the spaghetti directly out of the pot, put it in the serving bowl before adding the herbs. That way, none of the herbs cling to the pot and get left behind. Source: The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

This recipe appears in a community cookbook with no one's name underneath it. I find the unsigned recipes in compilation cookbooks the most interesting. Why would anyone send a recipe and not want credit for it? Or do anonymous recipes happen when the Cookbook Committee feel like something should not be omitted from the book, even if no one sent it in? Perhaps someone in a Committee (always capitalized) meeting said something like "No one sent in herbed spaghetti? That shows up at every summer social!" and wrote the ingredient list out on the spot.

At any rate, this seemed like as good a time as any to try out this knife I got for Christmas. Its premise of operation looked intriguing, although the eagle on the handle is a bit much for me. I don't like my kitchenware to look like it's headed to a political rally.

Questionable iconography aside, I was a bit leery of the wooden cutting board that came with it. It seemed like it would not do well with my "shove everything in the dishwasher" approach to kitchen management.

I was going to cut up the herbs in small batches. Then I decided that the best way to test this thing was to overload it. Realistically, I need to know how well a kitchen device holds up to moderate-to-severe misuse before deciding whether it should permanently move into the kitchen. And so, I crammed all the green stuff into the bowl that came with this thing. It looked unexpectedly photogenic.

The bowl may not appear overloaded, but that's because the knife is weighing the herbs down.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well this thing worked. In a surprisingly short time, it reduced all our lovely fresh herbs to green confetti. It was like using a food processor without having to clean all the plastic parts later.So while this isn't something I can't live without, I won't rush to re-gift it either.

Countertop toys aside, here is where we get to the real fun of the recipe: adding enough garlic to weed out unworthy men. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think garlic bread is a relationship test.) You should know two things. One, I put in exactly as much garlic as the recipe calls for, and no more. Two, I quartered the entire recipe- garlic included. My eyes literally watered (that is not a complaint) while I stirred this.

The rest of the recipe is agreeably straightforward. We are supposed to melt the butter before we stir it in, which makes sense if you're not quartering the recipe. By the time you've melted an entire Junior League's worth of butter, the garlic already in your pan will have burnt. But  after quartering the recipe, I figured this small piece of butter could melt in the pan quickly enough. For those making the recipe in its original amounts, a whole stick of butter may seem excessive and also stereotypically southern. But keep in mind that said butter is going onto an entire pound of spaghetti. (It's still a lot of butter, though.)

Lastly, we add in the herbs. I noted that the recipe has you adding them at the absolute very end of the recipe. I guess our greens would go black and slimy if they cooked in the butter for more than a few seconds. The main thing to note is that ever since weed got upscaled to cannabis, I can never look at a pan of green stuff in oil the same again.

Our herbs shrank a lot in their short time in a hot pan. I wasn't expecting them to be reduced to such a small pile on top of the noodles.

Reminder: this green pile started out as enough herbs to fill a medium-sized salad bowl.

After stirring our herbed spaghetti together, it looked like I thought it would when I first decided to make it. It also smelled every bit as wonderful as I hoped.

I wasn't expecting to like dill in this, but I put it in anyways because someone (again, the recipe has no one's name under it) thought it was good enough to add here. Also, I've only ever encountered dill in pickles, and was curious to see what happens when dill gets separated from cucumbers. It was really good here, and I would definitely add it when making this again.

In short, this recipe is as good as it is simple. It's one of those recipes that seems too easy to bother writing down, just like few people need to consult instructions when making cinnamon toast. But I hadn't thought of making spaghetti with fresh dill and would never have done it had I not seen this written down.

Since I had a lot of extra dill and parsley in the refrigerator, I made herbed spaghetti again as soon as the garlic smell from the last batch got out of the house-- which took an unexpectedly long time. A house is never drafty when you need it to be. 

I couldn't help thinking that the recipe would be fantastic with few mushrooms in it. Because it's almost impossible to stir large things like sliced mushrooms into spaghetti (they always separate out and end up in a pile at the bottom of the pot), I used pasta shells instead. That way, everything would mix together.

And so, after the garlic had become a golden brown but before adding the herbs, we filled the frying pan with fungus. This led to a problem I should have seen coming: the mushrooms exuded a lot of juice. I didn't want to drain it off and throw it out (in part because I'd be pouring away the precious roasted garlic with the mushroom fluid). But I didn't want a puddle of mushroom-water at the bottom of an otherwise exquisite plate of pasta. 

And so, muttering to myself that no Italians were watching anyway, I stirred in enough flour to turn our mushroom water into a sauce that would stick to the noodles. I should note that the mushroom gravy tasted even better than I anticipated because it drew out the flavor of the garlic the entire time the mushrooms cooked. I hadn't even added our herbs yet, and this was already turning into something divine. The rest of the recipe was just as easy as last time: dump the herbs into the pan, pour everything onto the noodles, and serve. 

It's the best pasta I've had in ages. I cannot recommend it enough. Obviously, the herbs are open to variation.  But I strongly suggest trying fresh dill among the greens you choose.