Studies in Spaghetti

Favorite Recipes of Jaycee Wives Meats Edition Including Seafood and Poultry (1966) is a big, and in my copy's case, well-loved book. Its nearly 400 pages are battered, bent, stained, and circled. You can see that the spine is coming apart. As I dug through its thousands of recipes, I wasn't sure whether to start with the oddly béchamel-free Beef Béchamel on the first page of the first chapter, or to present a fresh glut of meat-and-gelatin fun-house mirrors from salad chapter.

After I got through the book, though, I noticed how many spaghetti recipes I'd marked as being interesting. So here they are: the weirdest spaghetti recipes from the Jaycee wives. 

Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of relatively normal sauces, like this one:

Ground beef with tomatoes, green peppers, mushrooms, and some Italian seasoning is pretty standard. I wondered about the title, though. Italian "Lower Class" Spaghetti Sauce? What makes it "lower class"? It even has olives, which weren't exactly cheap compared to the other ingredients. Then it hit me! The olives made this similar to pasta puttanesca (even if it's missing the anchovy and capers). Maybe Mrs. Larry Lewis couldn't stand knowing that someone out there would realize puttanesca translates to "in the style of a whore," so she had to sanitize it for publication! I laughed a little as I figured out the psychology of this one....

Another recipe reminded me of my grandma who saw lots more ingredients as interchangeable than most people do. (I'll always remember my husband trying to hide his surprise at finding grated up carrots and zucchini on his cheese pizza because grandma just used a jar of garden-style marinara as the sauce.) Guess which two tomato-based dishes Mrs. Terry Lower sees as being pretty much the same thing. (It shouldn't be hard!)

Yep, spaghetti sauce and chili con carne are pretty much the same thing. Just add a can of kidney beans if you want it to be chili. (And yes, of course both are based on a can of tomato soup. Why would you ask?)

While I'm not entirely sure that dumping a can of kidney beans into spaghetti sauce turns it into chili, I'm completely clueless about what makes Mexican Spaghetti, well, Mexican.

Spaghetti mixed with ground ham, green pepper, stewed tomatoes, and canned peas, then topped off with American cheese and bacon sounds like... well... I wouldn't guess Mexican, but I might guess the casserole dish with the most left in it when the church potluck is over.

Speaking of things you don't want to encounter in a potluck, how about anything based on mushy canned spaghetti?

Mushy canned spaghetti with kidney beans, chili powder, and nutmeg.... Even weirder.

To finish this off, let's go to a hopeful image, like the wide open sky:

Sorry... Not that open sky. I meant this one:

Yes, if you take your plate of spaghetti topped with canned onion, pickle, and hot-dog-laced tomato sauce outside to eat under the open skies, there is always a chance that some hungry Canada geese will drop by and do the only thing they're useful for: eating it so you don't have to. Of course, then they'll shit it all back onto your lawn, but ... uh ... circle of life? Or something?