There’s one dish that unites us all… From young children obsessed with chicken tendies to hardcore foodies to broke college students to animated street dogs and everyone in between… Spaghetti! It’s National Spaghetti Day on January 4th, so let’s dig into this delightful dish with some delicious spaghetti facts!
1. Spaghetti Bolognese isn’t actually an Italian dish
It takes its name from the Bolognese sauce served with the noodles, featuring a tomato-based sauce cooked with ground meat. The sauce takes its name from the Italian city of Bologna, but Italians never serve it with spaghetti noodles, and with flat pasta instead. Serving it with noodles only became popular in the USA, with Italians seeing it as an inauthentic dish as a result. In fact, this has led some sources to refer to Spaghetti Bolognese as American spaghetti instead. Regardless, American cultural domination has led this variant of spaghetti to become iconic worldwide. A popular variant of this dish replaces the ground meat in the sauce with meatballs instead, leading to the name of spaghetti and meatballs.
2. Spaghetti gets its name from its shape
Spaghetti takes its name from its signature strands. Spaghetti is the plural form of the Italian word ‘spaghetto’, which comes from the word ‘spago’, meaning cord, string or twine.
3. Founding Father of Spaghetti
Believe it or not, Thomas Jefferson introduced pasta to America in 1789. Not only was pasta a tasty addition to American cuisine, but Jefferson also grew wheat at Shadwell Farms. This is the plantation that his home Monticello was located on. Jefferson’s father originally used the plantation to grow tobacco. In 1793 Thomas Jefferson returned to the farm from an extended stay in France and switched the plantation over to wheat and grain production. Wheat required less labor (which unfortunately was provided by slaves) but needed greater amounts of organization. The introduction of a new food product required growing new inputs. This is a gap that Thomas Jefferson was more than happy to fill. Jefferson continued to grow wheat on the Shadwell Farm Plantation until his death on July 4, 1826.
4. Spaghetti noodles aren’t all that hard to make
The basic ingredients for the dough include only pasta flour and water. The resulting ball of dough is rolled into a long, sausage-like shape, before getting pulled by the ends to make it thinner. Then, bringing the ends together to form a loop. After which pull apart the loop into two new sausage-like rolls. The process repeats until the pasta reaches the desired thinness. Finally, the spaghetti noodles are hung up to dry. Alternatively, cutting sheets could just cut noodles out of the dough, or the dough could get fed into a hand-rolled pasta machine. A pasta machine would force the dough against a filter with many small holes, forcing the dough to come out in its final, spaghetti form.
5. Spaghetti used to be much longer
Originally, most spaghetti was around 50 cm long. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 20th century that shorter lengths increased in popularity. These days it is most commonly available in 25 to 30cm lengths. Much easier to fit in the pot!
6. Spaghetti has been the subject of a famous TV hoax
On April Fools' Day in 1957, BBC’s Panorama featured a hoax broadcast about the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland. Because spaghetti was still considered a relatively exotic food they managed to convince thousands of people that spaghetti grew on trees, that frost could impair its flavor and that spaghetti strings always grow to the same length.
