Spaghetti as an exotic delicacy, rare enough that people could believe this story. The past truly is a far off and alien land.
It really seems that English cuisine improved a lot since then.
Spaghetti in tins (and I won't even dare to think about the quality of the "tomato sauce") is a crime against nature.
I wonder, though, if the 1950s Brits were mostly thrown off by the specific Italian word, "spaghetti", or if the entire concept of pasta/noodles would have been lost on them.
-- https://qnholifield.com/culinary-history/the-hidden-history-...
It seems absolutely wild that as recently as 1957, something as mundane as spaghetti was "relatively unknown in the UK". (Unless we are being meta-pranked...)
The article mention "hundreds phoned in the following day to question the authenticity of the story or ask for more information about spaghetti cultivation and how they could grow their own spaghetti trees". Of course it is unclear how many of these "hundreds" called to call bullshit, and how many called to get spaghetti-growing tips. Given Aprils Fools was a well known tradition at the time, it is possible some of the callers was in on the joke.
We have no idea how many people actually believed the hoax.
This is true, but I regulary read a satire magazin - and the readers letter are quite funny and scary, because I could not believe how many people do take BS seriously. Now of course, they could all be satire, too (but elaborate one, because from seemingly real FB accounts), but maybe keep in mind, how many people did (and still do) believe Covid was a hoax. And that there is an actual flat earth society.
We are not. I grew up in Denmark in the sixties. We really weren't lacking for anything, but spaghetti strictly came out of a tin together with some strange orange tomatoish sauce.
I graduated highschool in 1977. Everybody went to Copenhagen for a night on the town. That's were I saw the first pizza of my life.
https://www.historylink.org/file/20557
> By September 1949 The Seattle Times was touting the joint and its palpable history: "For a sentimental journey to an almost-vanished Seattle, and some fine Italian food, try ... Daverso's Palace Grill ... The huge old mahogany back bar, the tiled floors and walls, and the checkered tablecloths will make you nostalgic, and the king-size menu will make you hungry. A couple of specialties: Pizza, the hot pastry that looks like a phonograph record, covered with mushrooms, cheese and tomatoes ..." (Lund, "A La Carte").
> The fact that a writer for The Seattle Times in 1949 felt obligated to describe what a pizza looks like was simply because few in the area had ever seen or tried one. As Frank Daverso would later recall: "We had to give it away for the first four years. Nobody had ever heard of it. Customers liked our spaghetti and ravioli, so we'd give 'em a sample of pizza with each order. They seemed to like pizza but just wouldn't order it. Finally, we tried advertising. Sailors and other servicemen, who had eaten pizza in the East, began coming in and soon it caught on -- but it took four long years"
Anyway, despite the amused look on my parents' faces I think I was probaly fooled, but I was only 5.
Of course, growing up in an Italian family in Oregon, I knew perfectly well what spaghetti was made of, which made the documentary even more hilarious.
When we visited my grandmother near Portland, there would always be two big platters of spaghetti, one with the usual red sauce, and one with pesto!
We called that "spaghetti with green stuff" and always dug into it first. My aunt made her pesto with a mortar and pestle the old fashioned way.
One of my projects for this year is to get a marble mortar and olivewood pestle, and make pesto like that. Here's the recipe I'm starting with:
Try LeGrand pesto. It can be a bit difficult to find, but Whole Foods usually has it. Seriously, it's head and shoulders above any other pesto I've had (store bought, restaurant or homemade). We've been using it for like 15 years now.
https://misc.rural.narkive.com/cEsySUGR/california-s-velcro-...
But I don't get it.
How is being the default brand not good for them?
Do they really want everything to be called "hook and fastner"?
(I've heard that Heinz was prevented from using the name "Ketchup" in some country, as "ketchup" was considered generic for tomato paste, and Heinz didn't meet the legal definition - too much sugar or too few tomatoes.)
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/23/world/nuclear-prank-in-bu...
So how did you come to your conclusion?
I remember seeing that aired live on the national TV. Fun times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/arts/design/24abroad.html
Edit: rom-antics: Duly noted, thanks for the advice.
I have to wonder what her mind conjured up once it came out as a hoax, as she'd surely told everyone close to her by then.
Twenty years after the Spaghetti Tree broadcast, a vox pop of some gorgeous Brits painfully misunderstanding how, well, everything works, is my favourite 'I can't believe people thought that...' historical video.
https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1092120538259038209
I wonder if there's any contemporary examples of otherwise seemingly modern societies resisting something like metrication due to a basic comprehension failure.
"We ruled the world once didn't we?" is a depressing attitude and an attitude that has only got more entrenched as they've aged leading to brexit and the awful consequences.
> A bumper crop is a very large amount. Most often, the term bumper crop is used to describe a high yield of harvest in an agricultural endeavor, but it may be used figuratively to mean a large amount of something. The expression bumper crop came into common use around 1830, but the word bumper dates back farther. In the 1600s, a bumper was an extra large wine cup that when filled to the brim, held a great amount of wine. By the 1700s, the word bumper was used in conversation to mean a large amount of something. By 1830, this definition of the word bumper came to be used mostly in the expressions bumper crop and bumper year.
> Dickens wrote in 1839, “This charming actress will be greeted with a bumper,” meaning a crowded house at the theater.
Wew, that’s a false claim if I’ve ever seen one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU
It’s a family affair in Switzerland, unlike “large spaghetti plantations” in Italy.
Turns out, his teachers might have been on to something.
Ah, found it: https://reprobatepress.com/2022/04/01/jurassic-mansion-the-b...
The description of the life cycle of ratchet screwdriver fruits remains a masterpiece.
https://www.spaghettitree.co.uk/
https://www.spaghettitreesutton.co.uk/
Apparently in Oz too
I wonder if he was influenced by this hoax.
