Complex Numbers

Pasta Prime

How about we take a lunch break?

    How Spaghetti Squash Squiggled Its Way Onto American Tables  
It took a shift in food culture for consumers to embrace the “noodle plant.”

Yes, one reason I'm featuring this article is the glorious alliteration in the headline.

The other reason is that I actually like spaghetti squash, and I even liked it when my mother prepared it way back when. Most of the vegetables she cooked ended up like soggy rubber.

The year was 1974, and Takeo Sakata was holding a dinner party. “Conversation centered around the spaghetti squash,” a guest later recalled, “and the struggle Mr. Sakata had had in introducing it to the West.”

We would have planted it, I guess, sometime in the late 1970s, so that effort was at least partially successful. I guess.

Since the 1930s, Sakata had been the exclusive marketer of spaghetti squash in the United States. According to Dr. Harry Paris of Israel’s Volcani Institute Agricultural Research Organization, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on spaghetti squash, “[the Japanese] were the only ones interested in it for some time.”

The irony here is that squash is an American vegetable (as with tomatoes, it's botanically a fruit, but we're talking about culinary use here). By which I mean, its origin as a cultivated plant was in Central and South America. Cultural appropriation! (The article eventually goes into its cultivation history.)

Americans took a long time to warm to this mild-tasting, oblong yellow squash, set apart by its densely coiled inner fibers, which separate when the squash is cooked into strands that distinctly resemble noodles. “You’d be surprised how many examples there are of things that have been around a while until they are rediscovered by people who appreciate them,” says Dr. Paris. He compares the spaghetti squash with the zucchini, a crop that was local to Milan, Italy for decades before it became the world’s most popular summer squash.

To me, the greatest thing about spaghetti squash isn't the spaghetti-like feature (though that's pretty cool). It's that the stuff doesn't taste even a little bit like zucchini or yellow squash. Not that I hate those squashes, but I never choose them on purpose, either.

It would take a massive shift in Western food culture before consumers finally took notice of spaghetti squash: this time, as a health food.

Well, shit. If I'd known it was a health food, I'd have hated it. Like with kale.

In the late 20th century, the marketing of Sakata’s spaghetti squash began to center around its appeal to an increasingly calorie-conscious public. The flesh of the squash had long been compared with noodles, but now, for the first time, it was marketed as a healthier alternative to them, with one-fifth the calories, one-quarter the carbs, and a negligible amount of fat.

Let's be real: it's not exactly like spaghetti, or any other noodle. But it's similar enough that one can do the same things to it as with spaghetti, like loading it up with butter, bolognese sauce and Parmesan cheese, thus negating most of its health benefits.

Although recipes of the 1980s and 1990s still suggested boiling or steaming the squash, one of the first recipes to present it explicitly as a healthier pasta alternative, published by Frieda’s Branded Produce in 1975, was developed using a microwave oven.

I'm sure there are several ways to cook it, as with most vegetables, but roasting works well and produces less mess. I'd keep it far away from the microwave, though.

Spaghetti squash was finally in the limelight. “But you have to be a pretty good cook to know what to do with it,” says Dr. Paris.

Or just look for instructions on the internet, scroll past all the pages and pages of superfluous background information food bloggers seem to be compelled to preface their recipes with, and do what it says. It's really not that difficult, and I say that as a dedicated slacker. It's like hard-boiling eggs: if you know the right procedure and time involved, it's easy to get good results. It's not like making a soufflé, or even getting your steak temperature just right.

In any event, I didn't know the whole history, hence the article. And now I'm hungry...