In a church basement in Illinois, someone cracks four eggs into a bowl of spaghetti, then folds the mixture into a battered casserole dish. In a family kitchen in Ohio, another skips the eggs entirely but slides the whole mess — pasta, sauce, meat, cheese — into the oven, no recipe in sight. Neither dish exists in Italy. And yet, both feel like home.
Baked spaghetti was a fixture of my childhood, quietly omnipresent across the Midwest and South — never flashy, never fancy, just always there. It showed up at church potlucks under domed foil lids, in school lunch trays beside pools of canned peaches, and on our weeknight table with unfussy regularity.
