Spaghetti is a food that is enjoyed by millions of people around the world. Though it is traditionally a staple of Italian cuisine, it can be found in almost every country. It can be found for less than one dollar at the grocery store and can be ordered for more than twenty five dollars per plate at high-end restaurants. Most people dont know a lot about spaghetti though. This is a shame, because it has a very interesting history for a food so common and tasty.

Pasta remains an emblem of Italy. Italians were the first Western group to produce and consume pasta. Soon, pasta factories were popping up everywhere. This led to spaghettis rise to popularity by making it cheap to produce and cheap to buy.Spaghetti is cooked by boiling it in hot water. In its raw form it is dry, hard, and brittle. It is cooked so that it is softer and easier to eat. If your pasta is still crunchy it likely hasnt been cooked for long enough.Preferences vary on the hardness of cooked spaghetti though. In Italy the traditional way of cooking it is al dente. This means to the tooth in Italian. When spaghetti is cooked al dente, it is cooked so that it is soft, but still retains a little bit of hardness. In most other countries it is cooked much softer than this.See some of our culinary classes!Adding tomato sauce to spaghetti is one of the most popular ways that it is served. Many Americans regard this as the way that spaghetti was traditionally eaten in Italy. This isnt actually true. Tomatoes arent even native to Europe. They were first introduced when Hernn Cortz, the famous Spanish explorer, brought some back with him from the Americas in the early 1500s. Tomato sauce still didnt catch on right away. It wasnt until the late 1700s when the use of tomato sauce in Italian cooking was first documented.

Tomato sauce caught on quickly after it first began to be used. Today many people like to eat their spaghetti with meatballs as well. Like tomato sauce, meatballs werent a traditional part of Italian cuisine. Meat was scarce in Italy, so it was rare that meat was added to any dish, including spaghetti.It wasnt until Italians immigrated to America that meatballs became a popular accompaniment to spaghetti. In America meat was much more abundant than in Italy. This allowed Italians to buy meat for much cheaper and add it to their cooking. This was when the dish we now know as spaghetti and meatballs was born.Though spaghetti was first mass produced in Italy, today it is loved around the world. People love it because it is cheap, tastes great, and is easy to cook. In addition to eating spaghetti plain, with tomato sauce, or with meatballs, people also eat spaghetti with a variety of other ingredients added in. These other ingredients include all types of vegetables and seafood. Next time youre eating spaghetti, whether it is a cheap meal at home or an expensive meal out on the town, remember where spaghetti came from, and thank Italy for making it so dang popular!