https://snackstack.net/2024/05/25/uh-oh-a-story-of-spaghettios-and-forgotten-history/ Snack Stack + About Uh-Oh: A story of SpaghettiOs and forgotten history Hello, Snackers. This started as a history of one product, but then I found something more interesting. If you're new here (welcome!), Snack Stack is an award-winning newsletter about the cultural history of snacks and other foods. Subscribe to get more posts like this delivered right to your inbox. Paid subscribers get bonus posts like this one about dango (a snack from Japan) or this one about jhal muri (a snack from India). Reminder that if you were a paid subscriber on Substack, you need to set up a new account here on WordPress (sorry!) and you should have gotten a prorated refund already from Substack. Type your email... [ ] Subscribe [image-7] [image-11] Ad for SpaghettiOs in Australian Women's Weekly, 1967 The 1960s were a famously tumultuous decade, so I suppose it makes sense that the food followed suit. On the one hand: Julia Child, who made her pop-culture arrival after the first episode of "The French Chef" aired on July 26, 1962. On the other hand: spray cheese, which debuted in 1965. It was a contrast that feels deeply familiar today but was new back then: corporations cranking out an endless supply of new convenience foods while competing factions of culinary celebrities grew in prominence and cultural status and railed against the packaged foods that they viewed as mass-produced dreck, high in preservatives and low in any redeeming features. Writing in New York magazine in 1968 about "the rise of the Food Establishment," the oft-prescient Nora Ephron separated these tastemakers into two groups: the revolutionaries and the purists. When revolutionaries get together, they talk about the technical aspects of food: how to ripen a tomato, for example, and whether the extra volume provided by beating eggs with a wire whisk justifies not using the more convenient electric beater. On the other side are the purists or traditionalists, who see themselves as the last holdouts for haute cuisine. Their virtue is taste; their concern primarily French food. They are almost missionary-like, championing the cause of great food against the rising tide of the TV dinner, clamoring for better palates as they watch the children of America raised on a steady diet of SpaghettiOs. SpaghettiOs. Already the enemy of foodies even before the term "foodie" originated. Ephron always had an astonishing eye for detail, and this specific product is perfectly chosen. Here, after all, was a food built on pure novelty, marketed almost exclusively on the basis of its shape, a case study in the American tendency to value new and offbeat over proven quality When I first started looking into the history of SpaghettiOs, I thought this would be more or less the whole thing: It was just another convenience food in an era full of 'em. But as I dug through the archives, piecing together the origins and cultural context, a different but related story soon took over my attention. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Campbell's was throwing every idea at the wall in the late 1960s. Here's an ad from 1967, with SpaghettiOs on the bottom right. [image-9] It's a whole ecosystem of things from cans and jars and disposable aluminum-foil trays, everything meant to be prepared quickly and easily, with minimal mess. But SpaghettiOs stood alone as the most convenient of convenience foods. The early TV ads went all-in on this, touting them as a technological innovation that would finally, finally end the trauma of eating long strands of spaghetti--here, the ad proclaimed, was "the neat new spaghetti you can eat with a spoon," and "the greatest invention since the napkin." Tidiness was the reason the product existed at all, according to Donald Goerke, a marketing executive at Campbell's who created SpaghettiOs in 1965. "Its stable shape allowed a thinner strand of pasta to be used, making the reheated product less gummy," The New York Times explained in his obituary in 2010. "It also fit tidily in the bowl of a spoon." The product was an immediate hit, thanks in part to its catchy slogan (say it with me now: "Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs!") as well as efforts to promote it as part of a larger dish or dinner. It wasn't just something you could heat and it--there were so many other options! Your only limit was your ambition! Many of the advertised dishes feel like a wink toward possibility rather than the reality of what home cooks were actually doing with SpaghettiOs. Convenience foods aren't meant to be complicated, and I presume the sequence for nearly every consumer was a straightforward can > bowl > mouth, possibly but not necessarily adding heat in the middle. But it sure feels nice to know that you could do more with that canned delicacy, just like Julia Child used her own ingredients as building blocks for elaborate meals. I took too many screenshots of recipes that included SpaghettiOs, so I'll share a few here, starting with an authentic dish from Naples. [image] Just like nonna's pasta! If that's not your style and you like getting your recipes from ads in TV Guide, here are some from 1965: [image-10] If that's a bit too colorful and upbeat, perhaps you'd like to use SpaghettiOs to make this cursed clown recipe from 1966. (Look closely but not too closely or it'll steal your soul.) [spaghettios-clown2]I warned you not to look. --------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the point in a Snack Stack post where I usually zoom back in time a bit to debunk the origin story and investigate who really invented it. Usually it's someone other than the person who gets all the credit (as in the recent investigation of Pop-Tarts). Mythology often serves dubious ends and deviates significantly from reality, and that's especially true in the food world. This time, though, the legend seems to be accurate. Donald Goerke invented SpaghettiOs and they were the original little spaghetti circles in a can; he didn't steal the idea from anyone. Credit where it's due. Good for him. Given the product's success in sales and fame, I see why he got an obituary in the Times. But there is more to the story. While there may not have been any predecessors in the circular-spaghetti game, regular canned spaghetti, the long kind, had been around for decades. (Since you're wondering which came first: Cheerios entered the market in 1941. So Goerke may have gotten some inspiration there.) Beyond the shape, the new products sold well because they capitalized on the broader trend of Italian (and Italian-inspired) foods made for an American audience. Goerke was surfing that wave. A decade earlier, newspapers identified had identified part of the rising fad of "Continental" food, and pizza and pasta and their ilk were becoming ubiquitous. (Go read Ian McCellan's Red Sauce if you'd like a deep dive.) The Italian-American food cultural moment had no single origin story or inventor. But there was one name I kept finding in my research on SpaghettiOs, a woman who was an important innovator in canned pasta before Goerke got there, but whose name has been lost to history. Honestly, there's not much more to say about SpaghettiOs. But there's lots you should know about Betty Ossola. --------------------------------------------------------------------- [image-13] That's Ossola in 1951. Read the caption and hold that thought; we'll get there. She was born in 1913 and by the age of 31, she had become executive vice president and general manager of the J. Ossola Company, which had been founded by her father in 1901. The company was best known for importing food, but under Betty's direction, it also started tweaking products for American audiences. One profile published in 1952 noted that Betty had decided to take olives out of the luxury class and whipped up a concoction called olive condite--a preparation usable as a salad dressing or hors d'oeuvre spread--put it in a useful kitchen jar and slapped her firm's brand name on it. She also developed a canned minestrone soup, an all-purpose tomato sauce ... and started to pack California black olives cured in olive oil. A different profile from the same year credited her with coming up the idea of selling olive oil and red wine vinegar in paired bottles, "for immediate table use." If you've seen any of those products in the USA, and you probably have, there's a good chance you can thank Betty Ossola. Her most prominent marketing effort, which received widespread media attention in 1951, came when Ossala picked up on a pop-culture trend. The term "pasta fazool!!" had become a popular expression for teenagers and radio hosts, as a nonsensical stand-in for swearing. The phrase was a mispronunciation of "pasta e fagioli," an actual Italian dish, but Betty Ossola saw an opportunity to capitalize on the moment, in the same way that modern brands do their best to monetize memes. "It seemed a shame to Betty Ossola to waste all this fine free publicity," AP reporter Cynthia Lowry reported in 1952, so she whipped up a [pasta e fagioli] recipe modified for American palates, put the result up in cans and had the name copyright. It's selling very well, she says, all over the country. In 1951, Look magazine featured Ossola in a story on six prominent women in the food industry, including Margaret Rudkin, the founder of Pepperidge Farm and Lily Bollinger, the head of Bollinger Champagne. Ossola was the young gun of the group, in her early thirties but already a widely respected businessperson at the national level. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Rudkin and Bollinger have Wikipedia pages; so does Donald Goerke, the SpaghettiOs guy, who also got the Times obit. Their names are inscribed in food history, known entities with known legacies. Meanwhile, Betty Ossola faded from the public consciousness by the 1970s. Go back and read that list of accomplishments and consider when she was doing all that, and how she fed into a broader cultural moment. Goerke made the more famous single product, no argument there, but beyond the sales figures Ossola may well have had a broader cultural impact by popularizing Italian foods (the real deal) in the first place. There is no Wikipedia page for Betty Ossala. There was no big obituary when she died in 1986, just the basic one run by her family: [image-15] I don't know the rest of her story, after the 1950s. Pasta Fazool was still being sold in 1967, although the Ossola brand had a new parent company, called Filigree Foods. Betty Ossola's name vanished from the news after that peak in the early 1950s. It's jarring to read the stories from her brief period of fame. There were more than a dozen glowing articles, from that Look article to newspapers pieces to a shout-out in the pasta industry publication Macaroni Journal. Almost all of them led with comments on her looks and a patronizing, sexist riff on how amazing it was to see a woman succeed in business. It is not subtle or rare. It's everywhere. Three examples: [image-18] [image-17] [image-19] None of this is should be surprising, of course, not if you know anything about cultural history or sexism in the workplace, especially during this era. But it's still jarring and depressing. --------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a newsletter about the history of specific foods, and I love going down rabbit holes to solve those mysteries. But sometimes the story I started exploring leads me to something more interesting. When those moments come, I usually set that other thing aside and try to keep my attention on the task at hand. That's all well and good and keeps things focused, but I think it's essential to ride that curiosity as far as it'll go now and then. I don't know much about the biographies of Donald Goerke or Betty Ossola, but she seems way more interesting. He seems like a corporate-backed a one-hit wonder, who hit it big in the most straightforward way possible. It's fine; I'm sure he was a nice guy. But reading about him, I don't feel like I've learned more or found someone new to root for. She, meanwhile, helped create the whole genre in which he worked, and she did it while jumping over endless hurdles of sexism. I've written before about how most food origin stories are lies, and the problem with the whole Great Man of History mythology within the realm of food. But sometimes it is worth singling out a specific person for more attention, because they deserve it. So, yeah, Donald Goerke does get credit for SpaghettiOs. But I'd rather you remembered the name Betty Ossola. Happy snacking! Doug Type your email... 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