(Here I am referring not to pasta in general but to actual spaghetti: long, thin strings of pasta.) Spaghetti and tomato sauce are like Sonny and Cher: catchy enough together, sure, but actually better when working independently. According to a TED Talk by Malcolm Gladwell with title "Choice, Happiness and Spaghetti Sauce," Moskowitz discovered in the early 1980s that approximately one-third of Americans like their tomato sauce "extra-chunky." Following this discovery, Prego "completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce and came out with a line of extra-chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti-sauce business in this country."Īll this is a very long and complicated way of saying that history has conspired to get us to put the wrong sauce on our spaghetti. This is relevant because around the same time Kummer was schooling Atlantic subscribers in the meaning of al dente, food psychologist Howard Moscowitz was expanding "spaghetti sauce" horizons. In fact, I'll note that canned tomato soup, while not exactly sugo di pomodoro, possesses a texture somewhat reminiscent of Italian tomato sauce, which is traditionally pure´ed in a food mill to make it smooth. Mocking the processed culinary horrors of yesteryear is like shooting fish in a barrel, so I won't do too much of it here. In 1927 Kraft began marketing grated 'Parmesan' cheese in a cardboard container with a perforated top and suggested that the cheese be served as a topping for spaghetti with tomato sauce."
One typical recipe for tomato sauce omitted garlic and consisted of canned tomato soup with Worcestershire sauce added. Cooking pasta long enough to can it safely institutionalized what was already a long-established practice, one for which Italians still deride Americans - overcooking pasta and thus robbing it of its savor and interest. "Campbell's, Heinz, and other manufacturers brought out canned macaroni with tomato sauce, joining Franco-American, which in the 1890s had begun to sell canned spaghetti, stressing that it used a French recipe. As Corby Kummer recounts in his masterful 1986 Atlantic magazine history of pasta in America:
Spaghetti was used as a catchall term for wheat noodles of all shapes, and tomato sauce was the default adornment - so much so that it came to be known by the alias "spaghetti sauce." These were dark times. For most of the 20th century, Americans didn't know much about pasta.