Fish and Spaghetti...
Makes more sense than you think.
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Fish and Spaghetti
Have you ever heard of fish and spaghetti? No, not separately. Paired together as a complete meal where the spaghetti is a side dish?
I was on the phone with Wisconsin Public Radio’s sound tech as we prepared for my live phone appearance. I’ve come to find out that it’s standard for the sound techs to ask you to start rambling on about what you had for breakfast instead of you just awkwardly saying, “Mic check, one, two. Anyone? Bueller?” I mentioned I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, but that fried fish was on the menu for the day because it was Lent Friday. The tech responded, in the first regional Wisconsin accent I’ve ever encountered that sounded like what the media portrays as the chosen Great Lakes cadence of John Candy and Dan Aykroyd’s cinematic heyday. “Oh, yeah,” she started, “fish fry friday is a big thing around here.” “Where do you get your fish?” I asked. “Oh, everywhere. Even the firehouses sell fried fish during this time of year.”
Uhhh, that would be nice to have access to.
Just that brief interaction led me down the rabbit hole for searching fish fry fridays presence and it wasn’t long before the pairing of spaghetti was offered.
It seems to be a thing specifically in the deep South and the Midwest. As we all know, even in those places I’m sure someone is like, “My family never…” Ok, calm down.
If you grew up like I did, spaghetti was on regular rotation. A heaping mess stayed in the pot, a reminder your diet is about to consist of jarred pasta sauce and store brand pasta. The first day my mom would serve the sauce and the noodles separately, adding as much or as little sauce to the naked noodles and combining at the table. She still serves her spaghetti this way. Nowadays, I much prefer to combine from the start. Topped with the green can of parmesan cheese dust and white slices of Wonderbread toasted in the toaster, slathered with butter, sprinkled with Lawry’s garlic salt to make a bootleg version of garlic bread.
As the days progressed, the noodles and sauce were combined and every time you walked into the house and passed the kitchen, that damn pot of spaghetti was staring you in the face. “Prepared to be sick’a me.” I already am, spaghetti!
Oh, you’re like my partner and don’t like leftovers? Then I guess you ain’t eating or you got McDonalds money because growing up, we were eating spaghetti for days straight until the whole damn pot is gone.
Maybe this is why the pairing of fried fish and spaghetti just makes sense. Two economical meals, paired together, offering a respite from the ho-humity of the repetitiousness that often occurs for those with a lack of access to money and variety.
Meat and more meat don’t go together? Well, if you look at how the meat is dispersed throughout spaghetti, a hungry and hardworking person might come home from being out in the elements all day, look down at the pot and think, “That ain’t enough protein to sustain me.” No? Just me? Okay.
Adrian Miller claims that the pairing isn’t as odd as you may think.
Spaghetti seems like the real head-scratcher here, but it shouldn’t be. Italians have long been in the American South as explorers, agricultural and railroad workers, and eventually, entrepreneurs. A large number of Italians settled in Louisiana and Mississippi in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Italian and Greek restaurateurs featured pasta dishes on their menus. African Americans in the South became familiar with spaghetti by either patronizing these restaurants or cooking it at the public places or private homes where they worked — and eventually, their own homes.
Thus, black Southerners were early adopters of spaghetti decades before the dish entered the American mainstream. By the late 1920s, spaghetti recipes were regularly appearing in African American cookbooks. In time, spaghetti eventually made the jump from entrée to side dish, and black Southern cooks thought nothing of pairing it with fried fish, much like they would with coleslaw or potato salad.
When Nana used to make spaghetti, like most of her food, she’d use an obscene amount of oil. So greasy. And having never seen pasta before, she’d use fideos. With canned pasta sauce (ragu) not readily available at local bodegas, Nana made her sauce as close to her neighbor Maria’s pasta sauce as she could. But, you know, with Puerto Rican flair.
Tomato sauce? Got that. Garlic? Why not super- garlicky adobo?Ooh, sazón for color. To the naked eye, Nana’s spaghetti looks like any ordinary spaghetti. But, as soon as the sauce touches the tip of your tongue, the adobo and sazón blast your brain, leaving your eyebrows suspended at the top of your forehead like a chola who’s surprised.
I don’t like any of that! I don’t appreciate the texture of fideos in spaghetti and meat sauce; their weight sort of turns into a clumpymound. Instead, I use regular spaghetti noodles and Mami’s spaghetti sauce recipe, which you also might find just as unorthodox. What’s so unorthodox about it? Well, she doctors up canned sauce with a spaghetti seasoning packet and adds Hillshire Farm smoked sausage.
Spaghetti with Not Fideos
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large yellow onion, coarsely diced
7 garlic cloves, coarsely diced
6 ounces Hillshire Farm smoked
sausage, cut into 1/4- inch- thick slices
1 pound ground bison or ground beef
1 packet spaghetti sauce seasoning
3 ounces tomato paste
4 ounces tomato sauce
4 to 6 cups water
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 pound dried spaghetti
Add the olive oil to a stockpot and place over medium- high heat. Add the onion and sauté for 3 to 4 minutes, or until softened, then add the garlic and sauté for 1 to 2 minutes more. Add the sausage and brown well for 2 to 4 minutes, then add the bison, breaking the meat apart with a wooden spoon, and cook for 3 minutes. Add the spaghetti sauce seasoning and stir to combine well, then add the tomato paste and stir again. Then stir in the tomato sauce and 4 cups of the water and season with salt and pepper. You want the flavors of the tomato paste and sauce to develop and caramelize, so they’re less acidic. Turn the heat to medium and let simmer for 30 to 40 minutes, adding more of the water as needed for your desired consistency. Taste and add the sugar, if necessary.
Bring a separate pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the spaghetti and cook to your desired texture. Drain the spaghetti, add tothe sauce, stir to combine well, and cook for 1 minute.
Serve the spaghetti immediately.
i'd never heard of spaghetti seasoning before, TIL. looks like lawry's and mccormick both have a version.
growing up, although my mom can cook, my dad did virtually all of the cooking because he had the job that allowed him to get home earlier. but the one thing my mom always made, was sauce. she'd make a huge pot on the weekend here or there, and then we'd freeze it. the recipe was passed down from my grandmother, who is irish, but when she and my grandfather were first married, they lived upstairs from an old, blind, italian man and he taught her how to make it. so when we had pasta for dinner, my dad boiled pasta, defrosted and heated up The Sauce. never, ever were they combined before hitting the plate. hot pasta went into a bowl, and a thick blanket of hot sauce went over the top. since learning to cook myself, i add some sauce to the pasta before serving but...i still like a thick blanket of sauce over the top. it just doesn't feel right otherwise.
and as for pasta as a side? as a born and bred new englander, if you went out to eat you could - and depending on the place, would - get a side of pasta with anything. even if the main was pasta, you would get more pasta on the side. even now some of the pizza/sub shop take out places will have things like lasagna or pasta and meatballs listed under "sides."
ps, "my family never...." "ok calm down" - fucking LOL. why do people always gotta be doing this so aggressively XD
I actually wanted to attend the last two classes you offered but it's hard to do during the workday....so thank you for offering a Saturday class, which I will sign up for! BTW, you had me at guayaba. I became blind to everything else once I read 'guayaba.'