Spaghetti Mix
When I was a kid, spaghetti had four ingredients:
- Noodles (not actually spaghetti; they were angel hair or capellini, cooked well past al dente)
- Ground beef
- Tomato Paste (in a tiny can)
- “Spaghetti Mix”
The most crucial part of the whole arrangement was the French’s Spaghetti Mix. Without this, dinner did not happen.
My mother and father still buy Spaghetti Mix. It comes in a foil packet and, for whatever reason, their local store stopped selling it. Mom has resorted to buying it in bulk from Amazon.
As a child, I believed this is how spaghetti was made, and that it would be the same anywhere I looked. I saw commercials for Prego and Ragu and wondered about the benefits of jar sauce over powder sauce. My mother, always a sport, bought a jar once (I can’t remember the brand) and we tried it in place of the revered Spaghetti Mix. It was a resounding failure.
In college, I became acutely aware of the importance other people place on culture. I was suddenly meeting people from all over the nation and the world. I was curious about them, they were curious about me.
“Where are you from?”
“What part of Virginia is that?”
“If you’re from Southern Virginia, why don’t you have an accent?”
The answers were always the same:
“Montross, in the Northern Neck.”
“It’s the northernmost of the Virginian peninsulas.”
“It comes out when I’m in church or when I’m drinking.”
I was meeting kids who identified as Italian American or Polish or Jewish or “from Philly”. In those years I was defining my own personality and I came to understand a harsh truth about myself and my family:
We were Boring Old White People.
Boring Old White People (BOWPs) are common to the area where I was born. We could just fall under the label of “Southerners,” but that term is deceptive. It doesn’t denote a specific lineage, only the fact that you were born south of the Maryland state line. I have considered doing one of those DNA tests that tells you what percentage of what ethnicity you are, but I have a funny feeling I already know the truth: I’m a BOWP. I come from English/German/Norse(?) stock, common to our area at the advent of our nation. My father and his father and his father before that were all too busy working to care about their genealogy. When I ask my dad about our background, he gives me the same response he’s given my whole life long: “Oh, who cares.”
My mother’s people were oystermen and shipbuilders and people from “the high hilly country” of Virginia. There are few clues, other than the fact that my maternal grandparents had family crests hanging beside their front door when I was growing up, and the veracity of them is up to some debate.
This spotty-but-somewhat-guessable lineage is key to being a BOWP. If your last name is reasonably German or Nordic or British, if you can manage a tan but typically burn, if you don’t have a strong nose or a high forehead or red hair or black hair or any distinguishing features, well my friend, you may be a BOWP. We might be related. But oh, who cares.
BOWPs don’t have signature dishes. Southerners do. My mother makes wonderful fried chicken and crab cakes and cornbread and black-eyed peas. My wife (another BOWP) is an excellent cook and knows well how to work a pie crust or a pot roast or a piece of salmon. But these are dishes common to the area, not to our bloodlines.
In college, I met Italian-American men and women who raved about their grandmothers’ “gravy”. I tried to chime in about how good my late grandmother’s gravy was on a steamy plate of mashed potatoes. They just rolled their eyes. Gravy, in their mind, was red, a shorthand for meaty tomato sauce. It was cooked in huge stock pots full of beef and veal and onions and garlic and gallons of crushed tomatoes.
Getting a taste of the household gravy would be a long time coming for me. The closest I would get in my college career was in my senior year when I worked at a well-liked pasta chain restaurant.
There, I had an employee discount and was strongly encouraged to try all the different sauces. I learned that “spaghetti sauce” was a misnomer. Spaghetti is a variety of pasta (or macaroni, if your gravy runs red) and the sauces that can be applied are many. I would order my dinner while I was on my shift and I paid a pittance for a decent plate of pasta. I tried out marinara (tomatoes, onions, garlic), bolognese (tomatoes, mire poix, beef, veal, sausage, cooked thick), alfredo (cream, cheese, garlic, butter), quatro formaggio (a mostly American contrivance), marsala (wine sauce), and “tomato sauce” (basically just marinara with no seasoning in it; this was reserved for the kids menu).
It was fun, playing around with the various sauces and pastas, trying new things. I make it a policy to never speak ill of a former employer but I will say that just about every sauce started its life in a giant can, seasonings already mixed in, ready to be heated and served. It was “Italian,” not Italian.
When my wife and I got married, we planned our ceremony and honeymoon simultaneously. Her grandmother (a BOWP who leans more German) had accrued a few credits with her timeshare company and, as a wedding gift, offered to put us up anywhere the company had room. We had a choice to make: a lazy honeymoon spent on a beach, or an adventurous honeymoon in a foreign locale.
The only thing my wife loves more than a beach is an adventure. We picked Italy.
After we tied the knot, we flew to London and then to Rome and spent three amazing days soaking up one of the oldest cities in the civilized world. We toured the Vatican and the Colosseum and a hundred little stops along the way. The plan was to stay in Rome a few days then take the train south to Nardo, a seaside town where Italians go to spend their summers.
Our last night in Rome, we walked around the corner from our hotel and sat at the first restaurant we found. There, on the sidewalk, staring up at buildings erected hundreds if not thousands of years ago, we were served what remains the greatest plate of pasta I have ever eaten in my entire life.
There, we had the linguine bolognese.
I work in Washington, DC, a city with plenty of escalators and plenty of grime. If someone had taken our plate of the linguine bolognese and kicked it down the escalator at Metro Center, I would dash down the stairs and eat it off the floor. It was that good. I still salivate when I think about it.
The plate itself was roughly fifteen inches edge to edge, and deep. I’m no genius at weights and measures, but I’d wager it was two pounds of pasta and another half-pound of sauce. The pasta was the perfect color, the perfect texture, al dente to the perfect degree. The sauce was a beautiful crimson color, full of meat, and it glistened in the candlelight.
My wife and I traded looks across the table. If you asked for a perfect picture of a plate of pasta, this was it. We moved the linguine bolognese to the center of the table and armed ourselves with forks. Our server asked if we wanted a dusting of cheese on top. We waived him off; we didn’t want anything to ruin it.
We took a bite. Our eyes closed simultaneously in rapture. We chewed and savored the most perfect pasta we’d ever had.
In an actual Italian restaurant, you start with pasta and work your way to other foods. You sit and enjoy an evening’s repast for hours and then finally wander home. No one rushes you; in fact, rushing is strongly discouraged. I tried to ask for the check that night, eager to get back to our hotel and slip off to sleep, and our waiter pointedly asked me, “Where do you have to be?” He was right. He brought us some dessert wine and we sat there as the sun set and the cool night air filled the street.
Our linguine bolognese was made with expert care from a time-tested recipe. It was not just part of a meal but its own tremendous experience. We would compare every new plate of food to the linguine bolognese. They would all be delicious, but they’d all fall short.
When I got back to the states, I vowed to master the perfect gravy. I looked over dozens of recipes and found the common threads: crushed tomatoes, onions and garlic, beef/pork/veal mixture, and only enough salt and pepper to bring out the flavor. After several trials, I found a gravy that works. As good as it is (and I’ve had actual Italians tell me it’s good), it’s not the linguine bolognese.
And it’s also not Spaghetti Mix.
Spaghetti Mix is not great pasta. But when I was little, it was the only pasta there was. I didn’t know hamburgers came any way other than well done. I didn’t know there were steaks other than t-bones. I didn’t know pancakes could be made without the aid of Bisquick.
My parents both worked when I was a kid. On weekends, meals took longer, tasted better, and required multiple serving dishes. On weekdays, we cooked fast and ate fast. We were just trying to get by. Spaghetti Mix was my parents’ way of feeding my sister and I something fun, something from outside the BOWP milieu, without having to spend hours cooking over a big pot of gravy. When I eat it, I don’t taste all the same flavors as I tasted in the linguini bolognese, but I do taste something familiar, something I really loved made by people who really loved me.
This past Christmas Eve day, long about lunch time, we rolled up to my parents’ house and sat down to a plate of capellini, cooked soft and pure white, covered in Spaghetti Mix sauce. I whipped the wet noodles around and cut up my spaghetti, just as a good boy should. I buttered a few pieces of white loaf bread and ate the whole plate of it while it was still piping hot.
The smell and the taste were just the same as they’d always been. In that moment, I was the same little boy that loved spaghetti, and supper time, and coming in when it’s dark.