Vintage Eats Recipe:  1982 Spaghetti Pizza

While talking with a friend about rising food costs, I tried to think of recipes that stretch the food budget.

There don’t seem to be many, but then I found Spaghetti Pizza.

Wow! Not only is the name fun, but it tastes great and you can feed a crowd of 10-12 with only one pound of ground beef and a few other items!

It is quite simple to make – if you’ve made spaghetti, you know to brown the beef, cook spaghetti and add spaghetti sauce.

Then it’s just a matter of cutting up a green pepper, onion, mozzarella cheese and adding pepperoni for the pizza effect — Voila! You have a dish set for kings – or at least, kids, teens, adults and others. Everyone should find something to like in this dish.

This recipe comes from the “Seconds, Please! Cookbook”, published by St. Joseph Hessen Cassel Church of Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1982. It has a blue spiral and 231 pages, including an index.

Inside the front cover the cookbook staff inserted a history of the Hessen Cassel area of Fort Wayne:

“About the year 1814, a small group of Germans left Hessen Cassel, Germany to seek their fortunes in the New World. After a brief stay in Detroit, MI, these intrepid emigrants turned West where fertile farmlands awaited their homesteading. Led by Indian guides, they made their way to Fort Wayne—then merely a stockade and known as Fort Miami located in the midst of an unbroken wilderness. From here these hardy settlers spread southward following old Indian trails or hacking their way through dense forests and wading through swamp that honeycombed the area, laboriously carving homesteads out of former homes of the Indians and the future site of their parish…”

There is more which I may include with a future recipe. I’ve marked several to try and look forward to tasting each one.

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I’m happy to announce that I’ve found a new group of people to receive my baked goods regularly. It is a group of individuals who have fallen on rough times and live in a local safe place. Their administrator said it was okay for me to drop off homemade goodies. I’ll be baking yummies and praying for these people at the same time.

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Farm Market Finds:

This week’s purchases at two farm markets include a butternut squash, fresh green beans, white and red onions, cinnamon bread. Yum!

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My Notes:  

1. The recipe mentioning using a 9”x13” pan. I preferred a thinner ‘crust’ of spaghetti so assembled the spaghetti pizza on a 11”x15” parchment-lined pan. It was perfect.
2. I cut back on the one pound of spaghetti noodles called for in the recipe to half a pound. It was just enough.
3. Knowing my test-tasters love spaghetti sauce, I used 48 ounces of sauce, which was way more than the recipe called for—32 ounces. Whatever makes your crowd happy.
4. My food processor came in handy for grinding the onion, green pepper and the cooked hamburger–I like meat on my pizzas to be cut fine.
5. A package of salami in my freezer doubled for pepperoni—most of you probably know pepperoni is a form of salami. I didn’t know that, having rarely eaten salami. I bought it on a whim when it was on sale. It tasted great!

I hope you enjoy this recipe as it may be able to stretch your food budget.

Enjoy!

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1982 Spaghetti Pizza

1 pound hamburger, browned—I added onion to the browning process

2 eggs, beaten

1 cup milk (I used skim)

1 small onion, chopped (1 cup)

1 green pepper, chopped (1/2 cup)

1 package pepperoni (1 cup)

2 24-ounce jars spaghetti sauce

2 cups mozzarella cheese, grated

1 pound spaghetti

1. Cook spaghetti according to directions on package; drain.
2. Mix milk and eggs with spaghetti.
3. Spread on a large, greased or parchment-lined pan.
4. Top with spaghetti sauce.
5. Sprinkle with cooked hamburger.
6. Add onion and green pepper.
7. Arrange pepperoni over the top.
8. Top with mozzarella cheese.
9. Bake 30 minutes at 350 degrees.
10. Let set 5 minutes before cutting into squares.

Yield: 12 servings