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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

> Pasta was not an everyday food in 1950s Britain, and it was known mainly from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce and considered by many to be an exotic delicacy.

Spaghetti as an exotic delicacy, rare enough that people could believe this story. The past truly is a far off and alien land.

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Looks like war time rationing is the reason it took a while to be established in the UK and it sounds like by the end of the 1950s pasta restaurants were a thing in Britain or at least London.

https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,371547,00.html

> from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce

It really seems that English cuisine improved a lot since then.

Spaghetti in tins (and I won't even dare to think about the quality of the "tomato sauce") is a crime against nature.

It's so ubiquitous now, that it's hard to believe it didn't achieve proliferation hundreds of years ago. I suppose tacos are heading in that direction, too.

I wonder, though, if the 1950s Brits were mostly thrown off by the specific Italian word, "spaghetti", or if the entire concept of pasta/noodles would have been lost on them.

> Over the course of a century, the pasta and cheese casserole traveled from Italy to France. By the 14th Century it is a French dish of parmesan and pasta that was brought to England. A cheese and pasta casserole known as “makerouns” was recorded in a the famous medieval French cookbook “The Forme of Cury”, which was written in the 14th century. It was made with fresh, hand-cut pasta which was sandwiched between a mixture of melted butter and cheese.

-- https://qnholifield.com/culinary-history/the-hidden-history-...

Its also very dull, i guess somebody falling out of a time-machine would be incredibbly overstimulated in our environment. Then again, this is quite the show of force, when it comes to adaption to circumstances..

Spaghetti from a can, no less.

Oh, the inhumanity

I found some 1950's womens' magazines in the cellar of my rented house a few years ago, one recounted the story by a woman who's husband returned from the Indian subcontinent with a taste for "curry and rice", so she prepared the same by adding curry powder to rice pudding ...

It's not as if Hawaiians of the same decade believed that Spam grew on bushes, did they?

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