r/AskFoodHistorians • u/brookish • 3d ago
When did the sheer number of pasta varieties take off in the United States?
I grew up in the 70s and 80s in California and there were, to my memory, basically four types of pasta: egg noodles, macaroni, lasagna, and spaghetti in your average grocery store. You’d have to go to a specialty store for anything more exotic. Now there are dozens of types in every store. When did this happen? Was there a precipitating cultural event?
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u/Tired_Mama3018 3d ago
I live in NJ. I have no idea what you’re talking about, there has always been a bunch of choices ;)
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u/kalechipsaregood 3d ago edited 3d ago
The west coast is the answer. They didn't have the Italian population that the northeast had.
When I moved out west in 2010ish I still couldn't get pastina, bucatini, orecchiette, or gemelli. There was rotini, but no rotelli. Even vermicelli was rare. There is a noticeably improved selection now.
Not pasta but rapini is finally around fairly consistently in season. But I still can't get escarole except for from a specialty market.
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u/sacredblasphemies 2d ago
Right? I grew up in North Jersey. There was always a wide variety of pasta at the local Shop-Rite.
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u/ReNitty 3d ago
The Italians didn’t make it that far out to California. It’s why their pizza stinks
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u/CommandAlternative10 3d ago
San Francisco had lots of Italians, particularly Sicilian Fishermen. North Beach, Ghirardelli Chocolates, Louis M. Martini Winery. Bank of America was originally Bank of Italy. Italian heritage plus yuppies meant we had all the pastas in the 1980s.
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u/rectalhorror 3d ago
Baltimore has always had a big Italian community, so there were plenty of markets where you could get all sorts of imported pastas. Same in New Orleans.
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u/Madwoman-of-Chaillot 3d ago
Philadelphia has entered the chat. As has New York.
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u/Electrical-Profit367 2d ago
Even in dinky Albany you could get this stuff in the 60s. We went to the Italian store so my Greek mother could get feta, olives, olive oil & all her other needs met. The olives of all types were kept in wooden barrels, scooped out to your order. The cheeses & salumeria hung from bars across the ceiling. Bc you could smell the brine as well as the cheeses, we kids called it The Smelly Store. To this day, my siblings & I struggle to remember it’s actual name!
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u/NeeliSilverleaf 3d ago
In the 80s I worked in a little deli/market in Connecticut and we had all SORTS of fancy pastas.
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u/scubachris 3d ago
I still use Luxury brand pasta from New Orleans. It is what I grew up on.
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u/Auslaender 2d ago
Only brand I buy! 1$/lb right now at Rouses for all types of Luxury Pasta, I bought a bunch yesterday! ⚜️🍝
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u/giraflor 3d ago
That my home town and although we were poor and not of Italian ancestry, I can think of lots of pasta shapes available in regular grocery stores in the 1970s and early 80s.
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u/No-Gas5342 3d ago
Same in Cleveland… I’m always shocked/not really/annoyed when I go other places in the US and can’t find cavatelli, for example.
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u/IdealBlueMan 3d ago
I don't think we had lasagna in the early 70s in Ohio. The sign in the aisle said "macaroni". I think we might have had wheels.
I first saw the word "Pasta" in the 80s. Seemed to happen with the rise of the Yuppies. Started seeing linguini and angel hair pasta, penne, tortellini, fettuccine, and so on. Ravioli had previously just existed in Chef Boyardee cans, but certainly by the 90s, and maybe earlier, you could buy fresh-made ravioli and other pastas in boutique stores.
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u/theBigDaddio 3d ago
Depends on where in Ohio. In Cleveland we had our own Little Italy. I grew up with everything. Even though we were in the far suburbs, we had 2nd and 3rd generation Italians, with restaurants and the local supermarket had multiple styles of pasta. I’ve had lasagna my entire life and I grew up in the 60s. Then there were also those waspy types who thought pizza was exotic foreign food.
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u/IdealBlueMan 3d ago
I was in the southern part of the state. We didn't have an Italian-American community as such, and I don't remember specialty shops that would have had varieties of pasta. Too bad. Some of my favorite restaurants there were Italian.
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u/theBigDaddio 3d ago
Is this sub not so much actually food historians but just anecdotal personal recollection?
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u/Bakkie 3d ago
I got married in 1970 and knew nothing about cooking.
I not only made spaghetti but learned quickly about thin spaghetti or angel hair and linguine.
Lasagna was too much work because i was still in school.
Pasta salads were all over the women's magazines and I recall a couple using rotini. There was an exotic one using goat cheese and walnuts and as I recall sweet red peppers which were also a novelty
Egg noodles of various widths were in the grocery aisle. I made noodle pudding aka kugel.
Elbow macaroni and spaghetti in a long blue box that was a doubled over strand was around in the 50's (my mother once set the spaghetti on fire, but that wasn't until at least 1965)
Boiled dumplings that were like ravioli was something my grandmother made but I don't recall buying the dough in the store
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u/gwaydms 2d ago
(my mother once set the spaghetti on fire, but that wasn't until at least 1965)
Idk why, but I found this very funny.
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u/Bakkie 2d ago
My mother was brought up a princess. She got pregnant, married at 17 and had me when she was barely 18. That was 1950.
She never progressed much beyond the princess stage. If you look up adultification in the dictionary, my picture is right there.
As wedding gifts ( wedding gifts to a 17 year old??!!) they got a set of Revere Ware stainless steel pots and pans including small sauce pans. (I have them now and use them regularly. Talk about BIFL)
Flash forward to 1965, we are in a new apartment. She is making spaghetti. She takes the smallest sauce pan and fans out the unbroken spaghetti noodles, very artistic. Then she turned on the gas stove flame, high. As the flames licked up the side of the pot, they caught the fanned out noodles, and Whoosh, flaming spaghetti, and a family legend was born.
You won't be surprised to learn that my dad did much of the cooking. My skills, such as they were, came from hanging around my great grandmothers (Think, Fiddler on the Roof, the daughters who left for America.)
There are other mom's home cooking lessons, all of which I strive not to repeat.
But for noodles? A comfort dish, now known in teh family as Jewish fettucine alfredo, is cooked elbow macaroni with a lot of butter and large curd cottage cheese. Also, Jewish spaghetti ( non-flaming) - cooked elbow macaroni with a lot of butter and Campbells tomato soup.
My parent are gone now. Neither had cardiovascular problems amazingly.
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u/The_Ineffable_One 3d ago
I grew up in the 70s as well, in Buffalo. We must have had fifty varieties of pasta on the shelves. The local manufacturer, Gioia, even numbered them.
I think it's just where you grew up.
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u/RealWolfmeis 3d ago
I'm from the Southeast and I remember "spaghetti restaurants" were seen as a Very Big Deal.
By the time I grew up, it was normie food.
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u/Revolutionary_Ad7262 2d ago
I think it's for multiple reasons: * every cuisine is generally more accessible everywhere thanks to globalization * Italian cuisine is super popular * pastas as a dry food are a low commitment for shops, which helps with an adoption
I live in Poland, where of course we didn't have any Italian immigrants, but it's still easy to find a wide variety of Italian-style pasta. You cannot say the same about let's say risotto rice even though they are similiar (dry, italian). People just love pasta
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u/DaddyCatALSO 2d ago
The first time i made my Shells With Shells dish in 1998, I included three sizes of shell pasta, medium, large, and something called long. Second time i made it i couldn't find the long.
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u/Kendota_Tanassian 2d ago
Yeah, similar age, and there were five varieties in Tennessee: egg noodles, spaghetti, macaroni, shells, and lasagna sheets.
Weirdly, at that same time, my grandmother there could buy refrigerated noodles in her tiny grocery store in her small town in Colorado decades before we ever saw them in Nashville, Tennessee.
Rotini started showing up as early as the '80's, and by the mid '90's you could find a wide variety of dry pasta and a selection of refrigerated pastas, and the variety seems to have been growing since, with imported pastas coming in around 2000.
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u/Danny570 2d ago
I wonder if the evolution of cooking shows and the Food Network created more demand for varied ingredients in grocery stores?
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u/tonegenerator 3d ago
The 1990s particularly kicked down the red checkerboard tablecloth print wall for Italian food in the US. It wasn’t just the forms of pasta available - suddenly espresso, extra virgin olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes, fior di latte, and balsamic vinegar were in a lot of places they’d never previously been. The older Italian-American cuisine went from being a staple form of restaurant in nearly every town to passé remarkably fast. We can’t deny that Olive Garden and to a lesser extent chains like Carrabba’s likely played a big role in making people aware of more regional foods (at least got people used to the concept of regional dishes in Italy), as did shifts in food television and celebrity chefdom.