by Kevin Burton
Got re-acquainted with an old boyhood pal last Wednesday and I had lasagna for dinner.
Sounds like glad tidings, yes?
Well maybe not so much. The “lasagna” came out of a can.
This all started with an e-mail from the Interesting Facts website, that alerted me to the interesting fact that Chef Boyardee, the name and face on zillions of cans of sweet, salty pasta products, was a real person. (Got to stop reading so many e-mails.)
Chef B and I were pretty well acquainted back in the 70s. My family often had cans of these pasta-based products. Remember that TV commercial? “Neat round spaghettis you can eat with a spoon…Uh oh SpaghettiOs!”
We often had those and sometimes ravioli and maybe Beefaghetti or Beefaroni.
Of my own volition, for the sake of nostalgia and this blog post, I purchased a small can of lasagna and a larger can of SpaghettiOs with meatballs.
When I told my wife Jeannette what I was up to, she said these products appeared on her table as well growing up. She said her mom sometimes served SpaghettiOs on camping trips. She warned me that this stuff is “packed with salt” and told me to drink a lot of water when eating them.
Jeannette then shocked me by trying the lasagna. She didn’t recoil at the taste but it was unfamiliar as she only ate the SpaghettiOs, not the lasagna. I’m not sure they had lasagna back in the day.
I heeded Jeannette’s warning about drinking water with the lasagna, but then discovered by reading labels that the lasagna is salty but less salty than the Campbell’s chicken noodle soup., which I had earlier in the day.
On the next day, Thursday, I tried the SpaghettiOs. It’s hard to imagine I used to eat this stuff eagerly, like I used to watch Baretta, to my latter-day embarrassment. SpaghettiOs could be a staple of my nuclear war survival kit. But on a normal Thursday without such duress, I could and should have been reaching for something else.
But, just to show you that it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, Jeannette happened to have a dentist appointment on Thursday. She came home with orders to eat only soft food. So it was that she perked up when she saw the leftovers, “Ooo, SpaghettiOs, that’s soft.”
Uh oh!
I reminded her that we also had Bob Evans original mashed potatoes in the fridge, but she went for the SpaghettiOs. Amazing! She finished off our supply, which may end forever, the Burtons’ dalliance into canned pasta nostalgia.
Anyway, here’s the lowdown on the real-life Chef, Boyardee, courtesy of Interesting Facts:
“The world knows him as the jovial-looking fellow whose face has graced untold numbers of ravioli cans, but to those who knew him in life, he was Ettore ‘Hector’ Boiardi — which is to say, Chef Boyardee was a real person.
“Born Oct. 22, 1897, in Piacenza, Italy, Boiardi was working as an apprentice chef by the age of 11 and founded the company bearing his name in 1928, after he and his family settled in Cleveland. The business began because Boiardi’s restaurant there was so successful that patrons wanted to learn how to make the dishes at home, which was remarkable for the time — Italian food wasn’t nearly as well known (and beloved) as it is today. In fact, Chef Boyardee has been credited with helping to popularize the cuisine in America.”
“There was just one problem, though: ‘Boiardi’ was difficult for Americans to pronounce, so his products were sold under the phonetic name of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee (since simplified to its current spelling).”
“Notably, Boiardi helped with the war effort during WWII by producing Army rations, which required keeping his factory in Milton, Pennsylvania, open 24 hours a day. By then, the company had become too big for Boiardi and his family to manage alone, so they sold it to the conglomerate Conagra in 1946. According to Boiardi’s niece, it was the only way to make sure everyone still had jobs after the war.”
“Boiardi continued appearing in commercials until 1978, and died on June 21, 1985.”
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