The Original Chef Boyardee Spaghetti Dinner

Between my childhood and college I can't tell you how many times I have burnt my tongue eating an over-microwaved bowl of Chef Boyardee pasta, but after years of only trying the stuff in the can today I am making the real Chef Boyardee's recipe for spaghetti alla Boyardee. So thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video as we explore the real, yet rather mythical life of Chef Boyardee, this time on Tasting History. Hello, may I come in? I am Chef Boyardee. Perhaps you have seen my picture on Chef Boyardee products at your grocer's. That is Chef Hector Boyardee, the real man behind the Chef Boyardee brand, and before he got into the canned pasta game he was making spaghetti dinners for the good people of Cleveland, Ohio, and it was these spaghetti dinners that really put him on the map, and after he started his famous brand he put out a cookbook in the late 1930s. Famous Italian Dishes by Chef Hector Boyardee Through Courtesy of Stop and Shop. Now I think he's playing a little fast and loose with the phrase Italian dishes as there are recipes for macaroni tamale loaf, chili con carne, and Mexican pancakes, but I suppose what made them Italian was that he incorporated his brand of Chef Boyardee Italian sauce in all of them. Now figuring out exactly what his original spaghetti dinners tasted like is probably not really realistic at this point, but we can get an idea using his recipe for spaghetti alla Boyardee, but while the recipe tells you how to make the spaghetti when it comes to the sauce, the real essence of the dish, he points you to use one seven ounce tin Chef Boyardee Italian style sauce. Not super helpful because you can't actually get that sauce anymore, but there is a light description of that sauce in the cookbook. It says it's a combination of Not really a recipe that we can follow, but some years back his great-niece Anna Boyardee put out a collection of recipes from her family, and one of those recipes was called Uncle Hector's Tomato Sauce. So I think that that's what we should probably use. So between the 1930s cookbook and her family's recipe I think we are pretty much ready to make the famous spaghetti alla Boyardee for which you will need two pounds or one kilogram of peeled tomatoes. Now you can use fresh tomatoes if they are in season. The thing is they're not really in season right now where I live, and they would have really not been in season most of the year when Chef Boyardee was cooking so he used canned tomatoes quite often so that's what I'm using. Six tablespoons or 90 milliliters of extra virgin olive oil, one cup of diced onion, a half cup of diced carrot, one and a half teaspoons of salt, one teaspoon fresh pepper, five medium basil leaves sliced into strips, one pound or a half kilogram of lean ground beef, and a half cup of sliced mushrooms. Now you'll notice that this recipe has no garlic which I thought was kind of odd but it turns out the area of northern Italy where Chef Boyardee was born, well they don't use garlic in their tomato sauce so neither did he, at least at first. That said if a clove of garlic happened to fall into your sauce I won't tell anyone. So the first thing that we need to do is to make our sauce from the tomatoes. So chop them into small pieces and then put them with all the juice into either a food mill or a conical sieve. The idea is to mash them up and get all of the pulp and juice to separate from the seeds. If you do use a conical sieve you'll want to get a pestle, a wooden pestle because one it's a lot easier, and two if you don't have yours laying around and you decide to use a spatula you might have to press so hard that you'll break the spatula like I did, but once the tomatoes are sauced heat the oil in a deep saucepan and add the chopped onion and sprinkle with about half of the salt. Then let them cook over a medium heat for about three minutes and make sure the heat isn't so high that it burns the onions. Then add in the carrots and let this all cook for another five or six minutes or until the onions are soft and translucent. Then add in the meat breaking it up into small bits and sprinkle the rest of the salt and pepper over the meat and cook for 10 to 12 minutes or until it's no longer pink. Then comes the tomato sauce you made and the mushrooms and stir it all together and then raise the heat a bit so it comes to a boil. Let it boil for just a few seconds and then reduce the heat to a simmer and then set the lid onto the pot leaving it slightly ajar and let it simmer for about 40 minutes. It'll start to thicken up and it'll also just become wonderfully aromatic during that time. After 40 minutes add in your sliced basil, stir it in, return the lid, and let it cook for another five minutes. So that is what Chef Boyardee called his Italian style sauce, and before we add it to some spaghetti let's see just how that sauce made a young Chef Boyardee the most famous Italian in America. So I first learned that Chef Boyardee was not only a real person but was from Cleveland by watching 30 Rock. See there was an episode where Liz Lemon was fed up with the work and stress of New York City so she decides to take an impromptu trip to Cleveland or as Jack says flee to the cleave, and when she gets there there's a whole song about how wonderful Cleveland is and it includes the lyric, Chef Boyardee was born here you know. Well it turns out I do know that that is actually not true because Ettore Boyardee was actually born in Borganova, Italy outside of Piacenza in 1897. He was the middle of three brothers all of whom would eventually work in the restaurant industry but for Ettore that work started when he was around 11 at the local restaurant La Croce Bianca or the White Cross. Now at such a young age he was probably the one squashing tomatoes and cleaning up but it did help him get his foot into the door of the restaurant industry and according to his family in the next few years he left Piacenza and ended up working at some fancy restaurants in Paris and London, and then at the age of 16 he boarded the ship La Lorraine from France on his way to America, and according to records at Ellis Island he arrived on May 9th, 1914 and he was going to New York City to join his brother Paolo. Now usually I don't look up ships manifests to corroborate details like when young Ettore would arrive in New York but I did for this one because basically for the next 10 years of his life everything is kind of kind of suspect. There are a lot of versions of what goes on. Now I'm not saying that anything was was made up but I'm not saying that anything wasn't either. Even his family's own account of his life has a lot of holes in it and so it's kind of difficult to tell what actually happened and I'll explain as we go. So young Ettore arrives in New York in 1914 to meet up with his brother Paolo who had changed his name to Paul by that time who was working in restaurants he'd come over some years before. He was working as a waiter at the Persian room at the Plaza Hotel. Very swanky and according to most versions he was able to then get young Ettore who started to go by Hector, he was able to get him a job in the kitchens and some years later when Mario came over from Italy, the youngest brother, he got him a job there as well. So all three Boiardi boys are working at the plaza and this is where the story starts to show its cracks. Some versions of the story say that after just a year or so young Hector Boiardi became the head chef at the Plaza Hotel and is it impossible for a young teenager from Italy to become the head chef at one of the most prestigious hotels in the world? No it's not impossible but there's no reason to think that this actually happened. There are no records that I could find that corroborate this so who knows. His family actually tell a different story saying that he left the plaza fairly early on to become the head chef at an Italian restaurant called Barbetta which was then and still is on 46th street so maybe that's true. Again I couldn't find any records to confirm or deny it but it makes a little bit more sense. Where things really start to fall apart is when he cooked for the president. See according to most stories that you'll find online at the age of just 17 he was headhunted from the plaza to go to work at the exclusive Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia and there they put him in charge of catering their top events, and one of those events was the wedding reception for then president Woodrow Wilson, and this is the story that you find most everywhere including on the official Chef Boiardi website. The only issue is that the president didn't get married there. See Woodrow Wilson's first wife Ellen died while he was in office in 1914, and the following December 1915 he remarried this time to Edith Galt. So there was a wedding at that time but it was in Washington DC about six hours away from the hotel, and they kept it very small and very quiet partially because it had only been a year since his first wife had died, and partially because there were rumors floating around that she and the president had the first wife murdered. It's not true but still they didn't want any extra publicity so very, very small affair. But regardless of the size of the wedding it did not take place at the Greenboro Resort in West Virginia, though the president and his first wife who was not murdered, wink wink, had actually visited that resort a year earlier but it was at Easter of 1914 which was before Boiardi even got to the country. Slightly more plausible is the idea that Chef Boiardi organized a meal that the president held honoring troops returning from World War I, but again the timeline doesn't really add up. That would have been some years later, and there doesn't seem to be any record of this happening so maybe we just chalk it up to the chef's colorful origin story and leave it there. What is for certain is that at some point Hector did leave the plaza and around 1917 arrived in Cleveland, Ohio to work as the head chef at the Hotel Winton. Then in 1924 he and his wife Helen who he had met in Cleveland decided to lean into the chef's Italian roots and opened their own restaurant Il Giardino d'Italia, the Garden of Italy, and he opened it in an area called not Little Italy but Big Italy, and very quickly their restaurant attracted not only other Italian immigrants but those for whom Italian cuisine was something wholly new. See things like pizza and lasagna were fairly new in the U.S. and were found mostly in big cities that had little or big Italys, and spaghetti with meat sauce well that was that was a bona fide treat in Cleveland, and that is what made Chef Boiardi famous. People would come into the restaurant, try it, enjoy it so much that they would ask for an extra portion to take home. So he would wash out old milk bottles and fill it with his sauce, then send that and some uncooked spaghetti home with the people along with instructions on how to make the meal, and those instructions are basically the instructions that you find in the 1930s cookbook that we're cooking from today. Well the story goes that one night in 1927 Maurice and Ava Weiner who are a couple who own some local grocery stores come in and enjoy it so much that they ask Chef Hector if they can sell it in their store. The chef agreed but very quickly realized that just he and his wife making this sauce in in their restaurant it wasn't enough to keep up with demand. So the next year in 1928 with the help of his brother Mario they established the Chef Boiardi Food Company, and they opened up a little factory in Cleveland to make the sauce. They sold three sauces Italian style spaghetti sauce with meat, a meatless mushroom sauce, and a Naples style spaghetti sauce that had a bit of spice, and they marketed them as three delightful flavors. Used them alternately for a varied menu. They were an absolute hit and before long they were being sold in stores all over the Midwest. The only issue was that the customers and the people who were actually selling the sauce who worked for the chef none of them could pronounce his name right. So he started spelling it out phonetically, Boi-ar-di, and unfortunately they didn't specify where the accent was so Chef Boiardi quickly became Chef Boiardi. Now it wasn't just sauce that they were selling but an entire meal. Along with the can of tomato sauce you got a box of dried spaghetti, and a little canister of grated parmesan cheese. It could be prepared in only 12 minutes, and feed a family of three or four for only 29 cents. A perfect meal for a country which had just been plunged into the Great Depression. The product sold like gangbusters and by the late 1930s they had outgrown the Cleveland factory and so all three brothers got together and moved to Milton, Pennsylvania where they opened a new factory where they could grow their own mushrooms, and they even put out ads for local farmers to switch to tomato production. The only ingredient that they did still import was the parmesan cheese which they had imported from Italy, and for much of the mid-20th century they were the number one importer of parmesan to the U.S. Now business was going swell and they sold nationwide but everything changed when the U.S. entered World War II. See the government was not equipped to provide rations to all of the soldiers going overseas so much of the work was contracted out to companies like Hershey, Heinz, General Mills, and Pillsbury, and of course any company who was making canned foods. That meant Chef Boiardi was going to war. Almost overnight production shifted to make rations, and they quickly became one of the top suppliers of product for C and K rations with dishes like meatballs and spaghetti, Vienna sausage, beef stew, and chili con carne. They even provided rations for the Soviets fighting on the eastern front, and to meet demand they had to hire a lot more employees so they became the number one employer in the area, and supposedly they were given medals from both the U.S. and the Soviet government for their work in in supplying the troops with food. Of course all of the stories have different medals being won so I'm not entirely sure what it is but suffice to say their efforts were appreciated. Unfortunately with the end of World War II also came the end of that military contract and so all those new employees would have to be laid off, but what's cool is instead of doing this the Boiardi brothers decided to sell to a much larger company in order to keep everyone employed. American Home Products took over production but Chef Hector Boiardi himself did stay on as a consultant and the face of the brand, which was great because in 1953 he got on TV. Hello, may I come in? Chef Boiardi's products are at Best Grocer. Ask for Chef Boiardi's spaghetti dinner. Only about 15 cents a serving. Over the next decades Boiardi's face was everywhere and his meals became the number one selling Italian food in the country. Meals like his famous spaghetti but also ravioli and pizza, though I'm curious exactly how it tasted because it didn't have melted mozzarella and it was really just his sauce on crust with some parmesan cheese grated on top. It was the 50s and food was kind of weird so they were lucky to have any pizza at all. Now soon after this they added what I think is the best addition to the brand and that is biferoni. It was always my favorite growing up. Now eventually in 1978 Chef Hector Boiardi stepped away from the company and he did pass away in 1985. Since his passing the brand has changed hands a few times and in doing so they've changed the recipe of the sauce so it doesn't taste the same as when I was a kid, and it's not just because my palate has matured it really does not taste the same. In fact some years back they released cans of what they called throwback recipes which went back to the older recipe but unfortunately I haven't seen that around in years so without being able to get my hands on some of Chef Hector's original Chef Boiardi sauce I guess I'm going to just have to put the whole spaghetti dinner together myself. So the chef's 1930s recipe says to bring a gallon of water to a boil then add two tablespoons of salt and eight ounces of dried spaghetti, and he says to cook the spaghetti for 12 minutes stirring frequently. Once cooked strain it, return it to the then add two tablespoons of butter and three tablespoons of grated parmesan cheese. Dish the spaghetti up with the sauce on top and sprinkle with more of his grated cheese and here we are. Spaghetti alla Boiardi, the original spaghetti dinner. Give it a taste. It's phenomenal. I knew it would be because it's made the whole house just smell wonderful but it's even better. The creaminess that you get from like the butter and cheese actually on the spaghetti. Really, really like that. It is a relatively simple sauce. There is so much flavor coming out. What I really like- so you get a lot of the herb like the basil but you also get a sweetness and there's no sugar added into this and a lot of tomato sauces now add sugar but if you cook it long enough with good tomatoes even if they're canned the sweetness comes from that so you don't need to add sugar. This is- this is really, really fantastic. I will be eating this entire thing and I'm going to be making this again. This is something I would- this is actually something I would make like just because it's a Thursday night so go ahead make this. It's not difficult. I'll make sure to put the recipe up on the Tasting History website, tastinghistory.com, a website that I made with help from today's sponsor Squarespace. 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So go there then go make some wonderful, wonderful spaghetti sauce and I will see you next time on Tasting History.