Humphrey Bogart Loved Eating This Rule-Breaking One-Pot Italian Dish

If a consortium of Italian grandmothers were to put down The Ten Commandments of making pasta, then "Thou Shalt Not Break The Spaghetti Before Boiling It" is likely to be right up there alongside "Thou Shalt Serve The Pasta Al Dente" and "Thou Shalt Only Add Salt To Boiling Water, Never Oil". Humphrey Bogart's favorite pasta recipe definitely breaks one of these rules, while pushing the limits of what's acceptable with the other two.

It should come as no surprise that a man who made a living out of playing characters who lived by their own moral code, loved eating a one-pot dish that breaks a cardinal rule of Italian cooking. The recipe in question is Bogart's 3-Step Spaghetti Loaf, where the first step is to break the spaghetti into pieces — the blasphemy! It also calls for cooking the pasta twice (which likely means it won't be al dente) and adding pods of garlic to the boiling water along with salt. While the last move isn't seen often in traditional recipes, it does seem to be a useful hack home cooks use when they don't feel like chopping garlic for the sauce.

Now that we've got the rule-breaking out of the way, here are the broad steps involved in making Bogart's Spaghetti Loaf. Boil the broken spaghetti with salt and garlic (use lots of water to ensure your pasta doesn't clump together). Make the base for a sauce by melting cheese into milk and stirring it into beaten eggs. Add the sauce into a baking tray with the boiled pasta, salt, onion, and parsley, and bake in a moderately hot oven for an hour. Cheese, milk, eggs, pasta: Definitely sounds like a cross between a box office hit and a warm hug.

Bogart's 3-Step Spaghetti Loaf recipe sounds a lot like a spaghetti casserole, and appears in the "Celebrity Cookbook", written by Paul Denis, a gossip columnist for Variety Magazine, in 1952. The book features more than 300 recipes, including Mae West's Wild Rice Stuffing, June Allyson's Crab à la Creole, a Caesar Salad by Shelley Winters, and Stuffed Tomatoes from Pat O'Brien's kitchen. In terms of hearty comfort food, one recipe from the same cookbook that comes close is composer and songwriter Bert Bacharach's Club Sandwich. His take on the classic sandwich features bacon, hot dogs, and tomatoes between two slices of toasted white bread.

Bogart himself clearly knew a thing or two about comfort food. The actor's favorite meal was a brunch-inspired classic, one he ate almost every day for lunch: Bacon or ham with eggs or French Toast (always, of course, with a side of Scotch). And while he might have been partial to his bacon and eggs, Bogart did have a long list of favorite restaurants across America, from The Formosa Cafe in Los Angeles to 21 Club in New York City.

One of the most entertaining stories involving Bogart and food (we're going to have to assume he ate something while downing copious amounts of Scotch?) involves Chasen's, the Los Angeles haunt where the who's who of Hollywood dined between the 1930s and 1960s. The story goes that Bogart and his Casablanca co-star Peter Lorre got so drunk there one night that they stole the restaurant's safe and left it in the middle of Beverly Boulevard. Sounds like the kind of night that should ideally end with a generous serving of the 3-Step Spaghetti Loaf.