From Why is Rice-A-Roni called “The San Francisco Treat”? - The Straight Dope, "Why is Rice-A-Roni called “The San Francisco Treat”, the staff reporter writes:
“I’d like to tell you there’s an amazing story behind the legend of Rice-a-Roni’s slogan, my friend. A tale of adventure, of deception, betrayal, redemption, folly, love, and victory! But, alas, I can’t, not really.”
Well, NPR did some digging, and it turns out that if you go back a bit further, it really is an amazing story, involving oppression, genocide, millions dead and millions more refugees on a death march across the desert, birth, loss, and reunion…
Pailadso Captanian was a young Armenian bride, whose husband was killed in the Armenian Genocide, as the Ottoman Turks killed or forced the Armenians out of the Ottoman Empire. Her husband was dead, and she was forced to abandon her two young sons to a Greek family in 1915 and march to Syria, while pregnant. Her third son was born in Syria, and it was not until 1919 that she was reunited with her other sons. She then moved to to New York, and worked as a seamstress to put her sons through school. After WWII, she moved to San Francisco, where she rented out a room to a newlywed couple.
The husband was Tom DeDomenico, whose family owned Golden Grain Macaroni Co., a pasta factory. His wife Lois learned Mrs. Captanian’s recipe for Armenian rice pilaf, which consisted of equal parts of rice and pasta (Golden Grain vermicelli broken into rice-sized pieces) sauteed in butter then cooked in chicken stock. After the couple moved out of Mrs. Captanian’s room, Lois continued to cook the Armenian pilaf. One evening Tom’s brother Vince decided that the pilaf recipe would make a good boxed product. The recipe was developed into the chicken flavored Rice-A-Roni in the Golden Grain test kitchen, and that’s what became the San Francisco Treat.
Mrs. Captanian was not only a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, she wrote a book in 1919, Memoires D’une Deportee, giving her firsthand account of the Armenian Genocide. This is one of the few firsthand accounts written about the genocide, and particularly valuable because it was written so soon after the events it chronicles.
Source information: Birth Of Rice-A-Roni: The Armenian-Italian Treat : NPR
–scot