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A Century of Chef Boyardee
Far be it from me to besmirch the fine name of Boyardee, but we know what we know. I’m not here to endorse this unpalatable family of products. I’m a culinary barbarian and even I am too good for the stuff that comes out of a can with marble-sized meatballs and sauce that’s sweeter than Welch’s grape juice. It’s food that’s best served to people in high chairs during the first two years of their life, though I’m sure some would consider that child abuse.
It’s always been considered hilarious that a “chef” was ever associated with the Boyardee product line, but the crazy thing is, it’s quite true. As with Colonel Sanders, the company’s mascot was also its founder Chef Ettore Boiardi (1897-1985). The dumbed down spelling of his name on the cans seems an outgrowth of the same impulses he brought to the mass distribution of foodstuffs, which meant catering to a common denominator that was not of the highest. The perplexing thing though is that, as we say, he was a genuine culinary professional. Boiardi had been the head chef at the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the Hotel Winton in Cleveland, prior to opening his own joint The Garden of Italy a century ago — 1924. Enthusiasm for his tomato sauce led to his selling it on the side in jars. Presumably the original product was more palatable than what they sell now. By 1928 demand was such that he opened a factory and offered a wide variety of food products. He sold his company to larger corporate concerns during World War Two, though he continued to participate in the branding for the rest of his life.
Prior to his line of canned pseudo-meals, Boardi’s initial innovation was a kit that you bought that included a container of his sauce, some spaghetti, and a small quantity of parmesan cheese. And the conceit was that it gave you an opportunity to make a “real” Italian meal in your home. What a festive treat! The idea that you would assemble these identical meals from kits like an Aurora model or a store-bought Halloween costume is of course risible, a kind of callous parody of the real thing, but people swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. In time, this particular product became obsolete because you could just buy pasta, sauce, cheese, and other ingredients at the store and assemble your own meal. Back in the day, though, for some people, this might be your only option.
I find Boiardi’s story illustrative of both the good and bad sides of America. On the one hand, he was an immigrant entrepreneur who made good. Yet the product (like just about everything in our lives now) placed convenience and economy over quality. Granted, the bar for quality was not high a century ago. For the first two-thirds or so of the 20th century, Italian cuisine for most Americans meant a red sauce joint, usually in a major city, with checked tablecloths, candles stuck in wine bottles for decor, and menues that consisted of spaghetti and meatballs, pizza, lasagna, red wine, and maybe bread sticks and antipasto. Basically an EPCOT Center or Las Vegas version of an Italian cultural experience. Otherwise this was a land of meat, potatoes, and boiled vegetables. The entire country was basically a hospital cafeteria. Most people didn’t start to become more open-minded about what they ate until Madison Avenue started hammering away at their old hidebound habits long about the 1970s. (Just one example: in 1969 Old El Paso began selling taco making kits to supermarkets, very similiar in conception to Boiardi’s boxed spaghetti dinners. Prior to the ’70s, outside of the Southwest most Americans were strangers to Mexican cuisine, even such as that.) That’s my anecdotal experience, but I bet data would back me up. Mind, everything is relative. To sophisticates, all others will always be philistines. I just happen to be both.
Anyhow, I’m old enough to remember occasions when my mother or father would open a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and that would be considered dinner. I’m sure that such a scenario continues to play out in some pockets of America. The U.S. prison system, for example! (I’m not punching down, btw. My target here, ultimately, is a corporation. This picture of an Italian man? Is the intellectual property of a conglomerate with the terrifying nonsense name of Conagra Brands. I wonder where they stand, for example, on Trump’s oft-expressed desire to eliminate the Food and Drug Administration?)
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