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Minnesota Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce

A pasta dish of Minnesota spaghetti simmered in a tomato sauce with onion, garlic, spices, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Minnesota Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the spaghetti

  1. Break the spaghetti into boiling water and boil for 30 minutes until tender.

  2. Strain the spaghetti.

  3. Cover the spaghetti with cold water.

Make the tomato sauce

  1. Boil the tomatoes, onion, garlic, cloves, allspice, peppers, and celery if using to prepare the tomato sauce.

  2. Strain the sauce through cheesecloth.

  3. Thicken the sauce with potato flour dissolved in cold water.

  4. Add butter to the sauce.

  5. Season with salt and red pepper.

  6. Boil for 5 more minutes.

Combine and serve

  1. Heat brown butter in a frying pan.

  2. Add the spaghetti and cook for a few minutes.

  3. Pour the tomato sauce over the spaghetti.

  4. Serve hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Spaghetti
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the sauce as it cooks.
Tomatoes
Provide the main body, moisture and acidity of the sauce.
Potato flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the spaghetti rather than running off.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, with browning in the pan adding nutty aroma.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with potato flour dissolved in cold water. Starch must be dissolved in cold water first so it does not clump; it then thickens as the sauce heats, and it needs to boil briefly to reach full thickening.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, tomato, onion, clove, garlic, allspice, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, tomato, onion, clove, garlic, allspice, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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