Spaghetti pie, cake, slice ...

"simple, luxurious, yet slightly trashy" Jamie Oliver

I didn't get to finish this post yesterday because I spent too much time in the internet rabbit hole, following various different trails - a sort of culinary evolution thing.

It all began with this particular recipe which Deb Perelman of The Smitten Kitchen for Spaghetti pie with pecorino and black pepper, although in this particular iteration of the recipe she added spinach to the mix, of which she said:

"while we enjoyed our green-flecked spaghetti wedges, we agreed we’d have liked it just as much with the greens on the side."

She had been inspired by a recipe for Cacio e pepe pasta pie on the Food and Wine and also, a touch, by Marcella Hazan's Spaghetti frittata (found on a website called My Carolina Kitchen). But like all of us who like to cook she fiddled with it, and maybe a little bit like me, sort of admitted that she should have kept to the original recipe.

Anyway the whole notion of a spaghetti pie, or cake as it is sometimes called made me think that I had seen a similar thing somewhere recently so it made me think I should investigate. Which led to the rabbit hole.

I think, initially I just tried to find examples of spaghetti pie, or cake - I was conscious that the terms pie and cake were interchangeable - and also at this stage of the investigation, it did indeed seem to be just spaghetti that was involved. The Spaghetti pie recipe from Gail Simmons, was the recipe that popped up the most. You can watch a video of her making it on the Châtelaine website, whose version this is. Gail Simmons, I found out is a well known Canadian cook - a judge on Top Chef which I assume is a king of Master Chef program and this dish is featured on the cover of one of her cookbooks. I guess the fact that so many people have made it is recommendation in itself.

She says she was inspired by a trip to New Zealand, where they apparently had spaghetti sandwiches. I'm not sure when that was, as I don't remember seeing one when in New Zealand, but perhaps I never ate at the kind of place where you would find this sort of thing. And this sort of thing pops up again in my wanderings. Junk food that is.

Gail Simmons' version includes healthy broccoli, and tomatoes, but there's a whole lot of unhealthy cheese in there, sausage too. The Châtelaine writer admits this but loved it and said:

"Thanks to the three eggs that hold it together, it's basically a spaghetti-filled, sausage-flecked quiche, which means it's also perfectly acceptable breakfast food."

There is not a lot to say about my other preliminary examples per se, so here are just a few that you might be interested to try: Spaghetti pie - David Lebovitz; Carbonara cake - Jamie Oliver; Spaghetti cake - Woolworths; Pasta and butternut squash cake - Yotam Ottolenghi, who said:

"This ‘cake’ was a revelation to me: who would have thought you could cook pasta for two hours and end up with something fresh, super-comforting and full of texture?" Yotam Ottolenghi

This group simply varied a bit with what you could add to the spaghetti and the cheese, and perhaps are worth trying. They fall into the "simple, luxurious, yet slightly trashy" category somewhat perfectly.

At this point I should insert a piece of advice offered by most of these cooks - make sure your springform pan is placed on a tray that will catch the drips of liquid that will seep through - some of them put baking paper underneath as well. I'm not sure whether any of them lined the pan with baking paper - surely that would help? It was actually mildly reassuring to hear that a couple of them did not think to do any of that and ended up with liquid all over their oven or on the floor.

I mentioned that spaghetti was the dominant pasta for the cake or pie, but here and there were variables, with bucatini and macaroni being the most common, but there is also another genre represented by this Rigatoni pie aka TikTok honeycomb pasta cake from Indulgent Eats in which the pasta is large tubes with a filling that are sandwiched together in that springform pan. Not quite as cohesive I'm guessing, but there are certainly lots of example out there. Some of them quite prestigious. Whether it originated on TikTok or not I am not sure and I didn't pursue.

Cake or pie, however? Cake I could see was an appropriate name, but pie? I know that the Americans use pie wher e we would say tart, but these weren't tarts, although the version from Taste's Michelle Southan - Ricotta and spinach spaghetti pie, rather neatly shows the evolution from a cake to a kind of deep dish tart. The cooked spaghetti mixture is fashioned into a shell, filled with a ricotta and spinach mix and topped with a cheese sauce. And in some ways this, to me anyway, looked the most tempting of the lot - although crispy spaghetti? But that's a thing as well isn't it? I did not go down that rabbit hole. Another day perhaps.

Pie to me is something with layers and/or a covering. And here we go from the sublime (well almost) to the ridiculous and downright trashy - even disgusting. Let's start with the almost sublime Spaghetti pie from The Mediterranean Dish, which has a layer of sautéed vegetables within the cake structure. I have to say the middle layer looks pretty thin, but I guess the really good thing about the whole concept is that it is almost infinitely variable.

So what about the idea of pastry - the usual covering for a pie? When it comes to pastry as an enclosing thing, I have several examples, two of which led me into the rabbit hole of origins and evolution to which I shall return. The first three are reasonable: Puffed pastry wrapped angel hair pasta pie from Food Network; Pasta pie with pastry rigatoni pasticciati - The Pasta Project and then Greek pasta pie/Makaronopita - Food Love - yes Greek and filo pastry.

I have to say the idea of pastry - one carb - enclosing another carb - pasta is not tempting, but the three example above at least look presentable.

Evolution in the 'ordinary world' of the very ungourmet cooks of the internet is rife on the net. My first somewhat horrific example of a spaghetti pie has no picture - it was a description I found on a website called The Miniatures Page, which is a sort of Reddit like place:

It's tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce, a layer of creamed potato, slices of bacon, and a layer of cheese (I've only ever seen cheddar used). ... The "feed the bunch" thing is definitely right, Ed – great family meal, and wouldn't cost that much.." (a reply) "This recipe sounds more like one of those "holy snot, I have to feed six kids and it's two weeks to payday" kinds of recipe. I would venture to guess that it's been modified from a depression-era or post-war dish, when food was often home-grown and eked out." The Miniatures Page

Tinned spaghetti - in my elitist world I had not even thought of tinned spaghetti - but oh the horror that I found on TikTok from #TheRealPussInBoots of which even one of the commenters said "this has to be a joke". American of course and totally repulsive - the TikTok link will take you to it. Being TikTok it's very short - have a look. It's quite unbelievable. The horror.

During my ramblings I also came across - thanks to Google thinking a tiny bit laterally - two related manifestations of a solid kind of pasta concoction - frittata - which takes us back to Deb Perelman's initial thought about Marcella Hazan's frittata. Jamie Oliver's associate Gennaro Contaldi demonstrates

4 ways of making pasta frittata - which does indeed seem to be genuine Italian thing.

However I also came across the slice concept, which I suppose is a kind of evolution from the frittata. It seems to me to be a rather Australian thing, but maybe I'm wrong here but just to demonstrate the Australianness of this idea, the best examples came from Coles - Spaghetti and bacon slice and Carbonara pasta slice.

By now I was completely mystified as to where this particular fancy came from. Initially, apart from the pasta frittata idea it seemed to be an Italian American thing with various people saying it originated in the early 1900s somewhere in the north. Taste Atlas - whose example of a layered version is shown here, decreed that it came from Colorado, although I vaguely remember Detroit being mentioned elsewhere. Nobody was very specific however.

And then when I was investigating the notion of wrapping it all in pastry I came across that Pasta pie with rigatoni pasticciati on The Pasta Project website, which I mentioned way back. It's a little bit different because it's pastry enclosing a runnier pasta sauce, not solid and cakelike. The interesting thing here is that the author found the recipe in a book on the cooking of Trentino Alto-Adige in Northern Italy and compared it to another similar recipe from the same region, saying that:

"Both these recipes come from the beautiful mountainous region where Italy borders with Austria. The food there is much influenced by Austrian and German cuisine and includes the kind of hearty dishes you’d expect in the mountains."

She also goes on to give other examples from elsewhere in Italy, so maybe the pastry enclosed pasta thing is indeed an Italian thing. Now whether that bears any relationship to the solid spaghetti cake concept I have no idea. I suspect that's definitely Italian/American.

And then what about that Greek dish? Also lasagne and its derivatives. I did not pursue that trail.

Rabbit holes. They suck you in.

No time to look back at years gone by today. Have to go and cook the dinner. Not a spaghetti cake, which I don't think really appeals to me.