Gather around children, and let me tell you a frightening tale. The tale of Irish-Italian Spaghetti!
It seems like this should be an easy tale, right? A really simple recipe, and also one of the most-requested recipes from the Better Homes & Gardens archives and one of the most shock-inducing recipe on my Facebook page, this is pretty straightforward. Dump a bunch of soup on meat and serve it over spaghetti. Bing, bam, boom, done.
Let me tell you something: I have been trying for over a year – a YEAR! – to make this crazy recipe. This represents the fifth time I have purchased ingredients for this. Disasters kept striking that prevented me from making this. The first time, TJ got really sick with the flu. The second time, Carolyn was supposed to come over and help me and she and her whole family got sick.
Fast forward a few months. I’m ready again to make this while we are in our temporary apartment. I get bronchitis and can’t make it. Fast forward a few more months. Carolyn is ready to come over to our new house and help me make Irish-Italian Spaghetti. We are reluctant to even type the name of the recipe to each other, for fear of jinxing it. I tell her when she comes over, we are going to make The Recipe That Cannot Be Named. A few hours later, Carolyn calls to say she isn’t coming over because her daughter caught something super-contagious at school. I gear myself up to make the recipe on my own. Tom comes home from work that night with a fever, and spends the next three days home from work with some horrible cold.
But do I let the recipe win? No. No! Never. This is the Mid-Century Menu, and I win, not the recipes. Me!
So I plan again. I buy the ingredients over several shopping trips so the universe can’t tell what I’m doing. I tell no one. No one!
Glop!
Then disaster strikes again. I let it slip to Carolyn that I am planning on making The Recipe That Cannot Be Named before St. Patrick’s Day. She laughs and tells all our friends about it, and we all get a good laugh. Too good, it seems, because the Universe hears us. It strikes and strikes fast. The stomach flu hits our whole house. I get a crazy six-week virus. My bronchitis comes back.
But this time, I’m not wussing out. I rise from my sick bed, and put on my luck apron. I chop onions and I fry hamburger. I plop soup on it and stir it all up. And behold:
Irish-Italian Spaghetti! Finally!!!
“How is it? Does it taste like Doom?”
“Only if by “Doom” you mean really bland.”
“Are you kidding? All this work and it tastes bland???”
“It barely even tastes like anything.”
The Verdict: Disappointing
From The Tasting Notes –
Well, this dish was at least edible. After all of this drama, I expected it to be some sort of amazing delicious secret recipe that I would have to keep under lock and key because the internet would break if I tried to give it out. But no. It just tasted like bland goo with hamburger in it. We got two meals out of it because it made a ton, after which I succumbed to the flu and spent the next four days in bed wanting to claw my stomach out. So in the end it got me, but not before I got the word out to all of you. But don’t make it, okay? The world sucks enough as it is without this bland recipe cursing people.
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Oh, man, I’m now afraid I’m going to get sick just by reading this! That aside, I am trying to figure out what the “Irish” is supposed to be in this recipe.
I have a recipe for beef stroganoff which is pretty similar, except that it uses sour cream instead of the cream of mushroom soup and thin strips of leftover medium rare beef instead of hamburger. It dates back to 1955, when it was a restaurant favorite at a nice place near my folks house in Denver. I’ve been enjoying Tom immensely. He’s a real hero to try those ’50’s gelatin salads. My MIL would put anything in gelatin, top it with mayo/sour cream/cream cheese and call it “Surprise Delight”. Surprise, yes; delight, not so much.
i didn’t get why they said it was “irish” ……. it sounds like normal spaghetti made with that bland watery dollar store canned sauce ….. youd of thought it would of had corned beef or even ground lamb something in it ..
Oh, the cultural appropriation of the mid-century recipe namer!
Looks and sounds BLECK!
A little insight though, a Full Irish Breakfast (as opposed to a Full English Breakfast) includes mushrooms and tomatoes. My guess is that’s where the “Irish” bit came in. For a MCM cook, opening a canned version of an ingredient was the norm not the aversion. Pasta needed no refrigeration or freezing to store so why not put the canned stuff on the pasta with some meat? BECAUSE IT DOESN’T TASTE GOOD was not an answer at the time.We’re probably lucky no one served cracks eggs over the top in all honesty.
Regarding the Irish side of the dish, as an Irish-American who grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood, the households in the neighborhood did not spend any money on spices and such. In our house, we had salt, pepper, sage (for Thanksgiving) and cinnamon. The Italian Spaghetti we ate for dinner came in a box with a packet of Italian seasonings. In this recipe, there is no oregano, garlic or basil. The last name of the person who submitted the recipe is Laughlin – that is Irish. This poor woman may be Italian, and this is the only way her husband will eat it :-).
Ruth, I have been meaning to ask you. Have you ever checked out to see if the ingredients in the canned soups of the 1940s and 1950s are the same as the canned soups today? We have more artificial flavoring in our food. I am wondering if canned soup was more flavorful back then.
Seriously? I was expecting something involving big strips of corned beef mingling with the noodles…
You’ve got it backwards. Full English includes mushrooms, full Irish can but it’s not a must.
But really, what makes it “Irish”? I expected finally chopped corn beef or something.
Well, I am proud of you honey because you didn’t let the recipe win!
I’ve wondered about that as well! I think I am going to have to contact Campbells. I thought about getting an old soup can, but I don’t think you were required to put the ingredients on labels until the 1950s or 1960s. And that might have just been for food additives, and may not have required all ingredients to be listed.
Or, it might have always have been this bland, and it’s our palates that have changed instead. So many possibilities!
Thanks!
Call me crazy but I thought this would be good! I’m going to have to try it regardless.
One of my mother’s recipes for a quick filling meal for the family was pretty similar. It was 1 lb. ground beef, 1 can Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, 1 lb. of Mueller’s macaroni shells, a few splashes of milk to think the condensed soup, and … drum roll please, curry powder to season it. She called it “curry,” so imagine my surprise when I first tried Indian cuisine.
It was a hot & filling meal that stuck to your ribs in a Hamburger Helper sort of way. Using curry for seasoning got around the blandness issue with your particular recipe.
(“Curry” had a tomato & rice based counterpart that was just as quick & filling: 1 lb. ground beef, 1 c. Uncle Ben’s rice, 1 c. water, 1 can Hunt’s tomato sauce, salt & pepper. We called it “red stuff.” That one had the advantage of only dirtying one pot. I still make red stuff from time to time, but I make it a little fancier, adding garlic, onions, bell pepper, celery and seasoning with chili powder.)
Your version of read stuff sounds almost like stuffed bell peppers- with the peppers chopped.
Here for my annual lamb cake check-in, but got excited when I saw this post. My mother in law frequently makes this dish – too frequently for my taste, but my husband loves it. I’m glad I’m not alone in concluding that Irish-Italian spaghetti is disappointing.
One of my all-time favorite dishes. I’ve loved it for as long as I can remember, (I’m 42 now)
The original dish probably tasted better because it had a lot more fat in it. It specifies browning onions in “hot fat,” which meant lard. A quick scan of 1940 grocery ads for ground beef finds there seemed to be three grades: regular at 11 cents/lb, “lean” for 15 cents and “A-1 bottom round” at 28c. I expect regular was something like a 75/25 grind.
I make a “no peek” stew that calls for tomato soup and cream of mushroom mixed and the end result after cooking for hours in the oven is a yummy taste. So, I was expecting to hear that this one tasted good. I wonder like another commenter if it could be missing fat content that once existed in meat. The beef I use has some marbling of fat. Thanks for sharing! I want to try it! But I won’t! *one eye winks
I am so glad I stumbled across your blog! I just love it!!!! PS- your husband is a really good sport.
This is the only spaghetti I ever had growing up. My grandmother started making it for her family of six kids and it was passed down. I had no idea it was from Better Homes and Gardens until I found out that another family from my hometown also grew up on it. I am beyond shocked and saddened by the end result and review of this awesome concoction. I wonder if you did not use enough of the spices or what could have happened. My family has always loved this. My daughter who is a vegan has creatively found a way for her to make it. I guess I’ll just chalk it up to people have different tastes and agree to disagree. But for my 40 plus years and three generations this has been the go to spaghetti sauce for us!!
This was the only spaghetti that my kids would eat when they were still living at home. They called it Memaw Lynda spaghetti because my mother-in-law was the only one in our world who knew it exist it existed! She had the cookbook that you have pictured here. I think that the fat content that Chef Fleisch mentioned along with the flavor of the soups does have an effect on it because it has never seemed as good to me as it did when my children were small, and I bought the higher fat vontent meat. (It was cheaper!) But tonight I saw your article and decided to make it again. Surely I had mushroom and tomato soup in the pantry. But as luck would have it, I had everthing except the tomato soup. So I substituted Organic Paesana Tomato and Basil sauce
and used only one-half of the 25 oz jar, added some garlic and surprise — it was very good! Not EXACTLY like the old stuff but close enough that you knew it was Memaw’s spaghetti. My kids would have been very happy.
Taste it after you season. I add more chili sauce. I use El Pato Mexican sauce. I also put Italian seasoning. Make it as spicy as you like. I also add more red pepper. Its a family favorite. You do need to taste to your liking. I hope you try again.
Actually, the hot fat is the 2 tablespoons of salad or olive oil listed right after the onion. But, it doesn’t say to drain after browning the beef, so there’s that.
SO I went and made this today. And it was awesome! I did add the spices at the end instead of in the meat before the sauce. I could really taste the spices. What is really good about it is the way the sauce clings to the noodles. mmmm
I made a vegan version of this with tofu crumbles in place of the ground beef, homemade sauces in place of the canned soups, and added a generous amount of garlic. Tasted great!