When it's time to hog down on some quick and easy pasta at the end of the day, there's nothing like our old friend tuna spaghetti. This is a Good Housekeeping, one-pot, casserole from the 50's which we're supposed to disdain but which I have always liked. In it's simplest form, it's just cook up a pound of spaghetti, drain, mix in a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup concentrate and one or two cans of tuna, and chow down. What's not to like?
In fact, our old friend is an inexpensive, easy-to-make, one-pot, stripped-down version of Tuna Tetrazini. Tetrazini was invented in California at the turn of the last century and comprises a mushroom/almond cream sauce with wine with some light meat - tuna, chicken, turkey, etc. - served over noodles of some form. For the past hundred years many people have been experimenting and taking off on this basic recipe and there are untold variants to be found, from full blown, start-from-scratch, all-fresh-ingredients to the aformentioned two-cans-in-a pound-of-pasta version. Well, no doubt the made from scratch version will give the best tasting results any time you have (a) the time, and (b) the calorie budget, but I wanted to see what kind of in between options we might find.
First thing was to have a look at this Cream of Mushroom soup stuff; what is it? The first five ingredients are water, mushrooms, modified food starch, wheat flour and vegetable oil. There is then a long list of "<2%" ingredients, many of which are flavorings and flavor enhancers. So, not much cream in the cream of mushroom soup, but it is good to see that mushrooms are a major component. Modified food starch is not really very descriptive. It turns out that basic food starch (from several different sources) can be modified in many ways (treated with acid, treated with base, treated with enzymes, etc.) in order to modify any one of several physical or chemical properties (for example how and at what temperature it gels) for any number of purposes (improved wallpaper paste, improved pizza topping...). So "modified food starch" does not tell us much. The word "food" at least let's us know we are not dealing with wallpaper paste or paper additives. We might presume that the goal of the particular modification in question is "makes it gel so it resembles a cream sauce even though there is no cream". Nutritionally, the can label claims that a 1/2 cup portion of condensed soup (about 2/5 of a can) contains 60 cal, 25 from fat. The label also claims 9 g carbs, 2.5 g fat, and 1 g protein. Rounding errors, especially for the 1 g protein, confounds things a little, but it looks like this works out to something like a 55/38/6 mix on a percentage basis. Not too bad, really, considering that the total calories are not very high and there is amble opportunity to balance things out with the added protein (meat) and carbs (pasta) in the final dish. The long list of "<2%'s" includes MSG, Disodium Guanylate, Disodium Inosinate, Yeast Extract, etc. These are compounds added to enhance the umami flavor. Go read about them on Wikipedia and decide for yourself if they offend you. For now, I am willing to let them slide since glutamates are naturally occurring organic compounds (and it doesn't offend me if they get made by a chemist) and the others are too expensive to use in significant quantity. So, I conclude that Campbell's Soup Company has provided us with a reasonably nutritious, reasonably honest, faux cream sauce based on modified food starch. It's a reasonable place to start for a not so hard, low fat, not-quite-top-shelf-but-a-cut-above-Good-Houskeeping tetrazini alternative.
The first thing to do is get some mushrooms in here. I sauteed about 300 g of slice white mushrooms in 1 1/2 pats of butter (adding water to keep from drying out) and added them to two cans of condensed mushroom soup. Next, key to real tetrazini is sherry or wine, so add 1 cup of white wine. Lemon juice sounds a good idea, so 1/4 cup. This is starting to taste like an interesting sauce. On a whim, 1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce. Every good sauce needs onions and garlic, so two large green onions from the garden and two cloves of garlic sauteed up in 1 tablespoon of olive oil and into the pot. Add old standbys: 1/4 t. ground mustard and 1/4 t. Paprika. Basic sauce is done - what to do with it?
The sauce is good but we've taken a turn into dark flavors, probably when the Worcestershire Sauce was added. Some other choice might have kept us light at that point and sent us elsewhere, but here we are now, too dark for tuna; we are definitely looking at chicken tetrazini with this one. On a lark and a taste, I added 1 teaspoon of caraway seed and one whole clove, crushed. I then split into two sauce pans, added canned chicken white meet to one, and some cubed tofu to the other for the vegetarian option. Served over spaghetti (I already took the tuna out, I couldn't very well sub the spaghetti and still call it "tuna spaghetti" by any stretch of the imagination) with fresh broccoli with lemon juice.
Well, this was pretty good, and a cut above simple tuna spaghetti. The mushrooms are a huge plus. The dark flavor direction worked with the caraway, but it would be nice to find a light flavor route to follow. I'll stay away from Worcester next time. The clove was brilliant and could have used more with the caraway.
Have fun experimenting and post your comments!
Lindsey
