National Spaghetti Day on January 4th offers an opportunity to pick your sauce and add it to that long, thin cylindrical pasta of Italian and Sicilian origin. Usually made from semolina flour, this pasta has been a worldwide favorite for ages and loved by millions.
- The word spaghetti is plural for the Italian word spaghetto, which is a diminutive of spago, meaning “thin string” or “twine.”
- American restaurants offered Spaghetti around the end of the 19th century as Spaghetti Italienne (which is believed to have consisted of noodles cooked past al dente and a mild tomato sauce flavored with easily found spices and vegetables such as cloves, bay leaves, and garlic). Decades later, cooks added oregano and basil to many recipes.
- There are records in the Jerusalem Talmud of itrium, a kind of boiled dough, commonly available in Palestine from the 3rd to 5th centuries AD.
- A 9th-century Arab dictionary describes itriyyaas as string-like shapes made of semolina and dried before cooking.
- In an 1154 writing for the Norman King of Sicily, itriyya is mentioned being manufactured and exported from Norman Sicily.
- You can fry your leftover spaghetti noodles.
- The average person in Italy eats more than 55 pounds of pasta every year.
- According to Miss Manners (a.k.a. Judith Martin), a fork is the only utensil that may be used to eat spaghetti while anyone is looking.
- Thin spaghetti served with tomato sauce dates only as far back as the 19th century, to Naples, Italy. In Naples, the sauce was served with fatty meats like bacon, ham or sausage. Meatballs made with beef as an accompaniment to spaghetti started showing up in American cookbooks around World War II.
- April 1 in 1957, the BBC made everyone believe that spaghetti grows on trees. At the time, spaghetti was considered by many as an exotic delicacy. The spoof program explained how severe frost can impair the flavor of the spaghetti and how each strand of spaghetti always grows to the same length. This is believed to be one of the first times television was used to stage an April Fools Day hoax.
- There are currently over 310 confirmed types of pasta. They are known by over 1300 names
- Spaghetti became truly popular in the United States only after they were offered in stores as easy to use spaghetti kits.
- First American factory for spaghetti production was established in Brooklyn in 1848.
- If pasta is cooked properly, it should stick to a wall when it is thrown.
- The three most popular pasta dishes are: macaroni cheese, spaghetti bolognaise and lasagne.
- One cup of cooked pasta is the size of your fist.
Sung to the tune of “On Top of Old Smoky,” the fun children’s song, “On Top of Spaghetti,” was written and originally sung by folk singer Tom Glazer with the Do-Re-Mi Children’s Chorus in 1963.
“On top of spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
I lost my poor meatball,
When somebody sneezed.
It rolled off the table,
And on to the floor,
And then my poor meatball,
Rolled out of the door.”
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