All-Time Bestselling Non-Elbow Shape Pasta: SpongeBob SquarePants.

Each year on July 7th, pasta lovers across the nation dig into one of their favorite noodles on National Macaroni Day.

• Made with durum wheat, macaroni is a large variety of dry pasta, which typically does not contain eggs. While many people think the shape gives macaroni its name, the kind of dough used to make the noodles gives it the name. The noodle is formed into shells, spirals, straight and many other shapes, too.
• In fact, elbow macaroni is the most common form found in the United States.
• Makaria is the origin of the word, and it’s from Medieval Greek. The word Makaria means “dirge”, or specifically in the case of the pasta “funeral meal”?
• Macaroni is used as the foundation of an American variety of goulash where it serves as the starch component of a heavily meat-laden dish.
• Macaroni is a corruption of the Italian maccheroni, which comes from the Latin macerare. The word means to bruise or crush; crushing wheat is how pasta is made.
• The modern word “macaroni” derives from the Sicilian term for kneading dough with energy, as early pasta making was often a laborious, day-long process.
• Kraft sells about a million boxes of macaroni and cheese per day.
• All-time bestselling non-elbow shape: SpongeBob SquarePants.
• Why did Yankee Doodle stick a feather in his cap and call it macaroni? In the 1700s, fashionable men who wore expensive Italian clothes were called macaroni, another word for “dandies.” The patriotic song is a jab at Americans who were so boorish that they thought a feather would make them fashionable.
• The macaroni penguin, with black and yellow plumes on its head, is named after those very same dandies from “Yankee Doodle.”
• The average American eats 19.8 pounds of pasta each year. The average Italian eats 62 pounds.
• In Hong Kong, macaroni is traditionally a breakfast food, cooked with mushrooms, peas, ham, eggs, and chicken stock.
• Thomas Jefferson introduced macaroni to the United States in 1789. He brought back a macaroni shaping machine after eating the dish in Naples, Italy.
•  According to a study by the Animal Behavior Society, the favorite food of city-dwelling rats is macaroni and cheese. It’s also the most requested food in college dorm cafeterias.
• The first reference to pasta, in a book, was in 1154.
• There are over 600 types of pasta, and some have over 1300 names.
• The three most popular pastas’ are: penne, spaghetti and macaroni.
• The traditional Italian way of cooking pasta is known as ‘al dente’.
• Some researchers place its discovery in the XIII Century by Marco Polo, who introduced the pasta in Italy upon returning from one of his trips to China in 1271. On chapter CLXXI from the “Books of the World’s Wonders”, Marco Polo makes a reference to the pasta in China.
• An early 5th-century cookbook describes a dish called lagana that consisted of layers of dough with meat stuffing, a possible ancestor of modern-day lasagna.
• In 1740, in the city of Venice, Paolo Adami, was granted the license to open the first pasta factory.

Sources:

National Day Calendar

Days of the Year

Portable Press

The Fact Site

Just Fun Facts