Same here. Beefaroni is about the same today as it was 40 years ago, and with a couple of slices of bread and butter on the side, and some green olives on the other side, it still makes a good a lunch as it did 40 years ago.
You think that’s bad? I read a recipe for lasagna which was published in the 50s or 60s. Ketchup was USED as the tomato sauce, and cottage cheese as the cheese.
My father said that canned Chef Boyardee ravioli was his lifeline in the Korean War (police action, whatever). He said that he was used to cheese ravioli, not beef, and he was used to Sicilian food, but that a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli was better than facing whatever was in the mess tent. He came home from that war with a new appreciation of cooking, and a new appreciation of toilet tissue.
When I was a kid, I sort of liked the canned pastas, but I hated the pasta that my mother made. When I was older, and started cooking pasta for my husband and later on for my daughter, I found out that what I really hated was the anise that my mother always added. And sometimes she added raisins, too. Grandma Bodoni had taught my mother how to cook for her dear son, and Grandma Bodoni loved anise. I only like anise/fennel flavoring in a few foods…and pasta sauce is NOT one of those foods. I still keep a can of beef ravioli in the pantry. Sometimes I just crave it, with a little garlic powder and a lot of grated Italian cheese mix (five kinds of cheese). The cats, by the way, are crazy for it.
When the Buittoni ravioli pastas started making their way into the dairy case, I introduced them to my father. He said that while they weren’t as good as his Aunt Mary’s ravioli, they were pretty damn good, and he has been eating the various kinds on a regular basis ever since. He likes the fact that they can be frozen, and then boiled up while still frozen. My favorite is the four cheese ravioli, with either a marinara sauce, or a meat sauce.
Ettore Boiardi himself ran the company from 1929 through 1946, and produced rations for the army during WWII. I can’t imagine the rations were any better than what you get in the can today.
Chef Boyardee is very precisely crafted to a child’s palate. It was OK to good when I was a kid. I tried some a few years back, and it’s pretty much inedible as an adult, and I am not a picky eater.
Having said this there were a lot of adult foods in the 60’s and 70’s that were pretty awful and remain awful. I’ll never understand how Campbell’s soups continue to sell as anything but a base for other recipes. As stand alone soups they are (for the most part) pretty terrible IMO.
I only recently found it unappetizing, and I know it hasn’t changed in my lifetime. Everyone in my family seems to have started to use more spices in foods.
Still, it’s better than the knockoff brands.
Personally, I don’t like most Italian foods made with tomato sauce. And, no, I wouldn’t like the way your grandma makes it. Blech. But I can tolerate Chef Boyardee in either the Ravioli or the Spaghetti and Meatballs, because neither of these taste anything like spaghetti. I don’t bother trying any other variety of canned pasta, because too often somebody tried to slip some spaghetti sauce into the mix.
For people who like Italian tomato-based sauces, I can appreciate how you feel. Take the mockery of alfredo sauce you find in jars. I don’t actually hate it, but it is nothing like alfredo sauce. Why so many companies produce variations on the same not-alfredo sauce continues to puzzle me. Hell, I’ve tried making the stuff myself, as once suggested by a poster on Le Dope complaining about the same thing. It’s not that much harder than heating up a jar.
So, with’s with the jar? I mean, Chef Boyardee has been formulated for simplistic palates to appeal to children, and that’s well enough understood. And some food lab came up with a way to create a shelf-stable sauce that was in the same color spectrum as alfredo sauce, but it’s marketed to adults who can get much better examples in the frozen food section. And every maker has their own variant. What gives? Surely they’re not fooling anybody. Is it a variant on the grape kool-aid scam where they’re trying to get the culture to agree to call a certain artificial flavor ‘grape’ even though it tastes nothing like grapes and there are real grapes readily available to compare it to?
Compared to my dad’s Naval-recipe glorified ketchup sauce for spaghetti, Chef Boyardee is good.
It fits with the other threads going on right now about whether people would eat People Chow if produced as a bag of kibble. Chef Boyardee, Dinty Moore, etc. are People Chow.
I ate a lot of Spaghettios as a kid, and lesser amounts of Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli and Beefaroni.
Once or twice a year I will pick up some Spaghettios or Beefaroni and I am always surprised by how sweet they are. I don’t know if it’s because my palate has changed, or if they are now sweeter, but I suspect it’s a bit of both. I think almost all packaged foods are sweeter now than they were in the 70s, and I eat fewer packaged foods these days. Double whammy for my taste buds.
I should also add that the texture of the canned pasta grosses me out a little, as an adult, if I think about it too much. Definitely didn’t have those qualms as a kid.
Spiced TVP is People Chow. If you flavor it correctly, it even makes its own gravy!
I make a copycat version of the Spaghetti-O’s and meatballs for my kids (I do that kind of thing a lot - doing homemade approximations of the processed crap they like, which is marginlly more healthy for them and I find it to be an interesting cooking challenge to see how close I can get it). I buy some boxed ring pasta, make little mini-meatballs and make a suace. From what I can tell, the key component to Chef Boyardee sauce (besides food coloring) is sugar. The rest of the seasoning is very mild – a little garlic and onion, not much, if anything, in way of herbs, and some Romano cheese. It’s all very tailored to a child’s palate. I can get it almost exact. My spaghetti-O’s are all but indistinguishible from the stuff in the can (my kids are exacting, down to the size of the meatballs). The only noticable difference is that my meatballs are meatier. The canned stuff uses a lot more cereal filler. A drop of yellow food coloring even helps to simulate the day-glo orange color.
I think another component, not an ingredient, but a preparation feature of the sauce is that it’s pretty non-acidic. If you skim the acid off the sauce it gets you closer to that cloying, kid-friendly, candy-sauce mouthfeel.
That’s just ooze.
:p:cool:
Damn,
Now I am wanting one of those make your own pizza kits for old times sake. Can’t even remember the last time I saw one, but they must be out there somewhere.
Getting Chef Boyardee instead of homemade spaghetti sauce was considered something of a treat when I was growing up. Like getting Oreos instead of home-baked cookies, or Wonder Bread instead of the bread my mom baked.
What can I say, we were kids.
We had it once in a while when my kids were little. It seems to be like penny candy or such like - better remembered than re-experienced. It doesn’t taste like anything much, and the pasta is mush intermixed with mealy balls of Alpo.
My kids vacuumed it up, but they did that with most everything. It may have been aimed at a kid’s palate.
Regards,
Shodan
When did canned pasta start to be marketed as a kid’s food and not something to feed your whole family? As far back as the 70’s I remember it being something your mom made you for lunch.
Adult Chef Boyardee lover here. Around here, it’s popular “hurricane food” (non-perishables that you can subsist on through a multi-day power outage).
Look on the topmost shelf in the supermarket, probably in the same section you’d find Pizza Quick Sauce, canned Kraft “parmesan” and spaghetti sauce. I saw some just a month or so ago in with the pizza sauces at one of my markets. You may be able to find some in yours.
Open a jar . .
of Pizza Quick Sauce
And open your own . .
pizzeria!
Yep, the pizza kits are still made. If you have any Dollar General stores in your area, I know I’ve seen them there.
I can’t believe ya’ll dissin’ on the Chef…all it means is that you’re not using enough grated Parmesan from the green can on it (which my young boys call “shakey cheese”)!!
What should really drive you up a wall is people who really do use ketchup as pizza sauce or spaghetti sauce. This was not at all uncommon, and not particularly limited to American Depression-era cuisine.