Spaghetti, the Friendly Food

Coming from Denmark into Toronto was coming into a melting pot of the world.  Nationalities from all over the world had immigrated to Canada after the war and Toronto was often the second stop for them (most landed in Halifax of course).  Canada offered a lot of opportunity to European immigrants.  Europe, even 12 years after the end of World War II, was still a devastated continent with a lot of poverty.  There were a lot of families who immigrated to Canada as “displaced persons” and the acronym DP was used disparagingly on any person with an accent.  Canadians of British descent were particularly arrogant and unwelcoming to foreigners in the 1950’s.  However for some unknown reason we either did not meet with this type of behaviour or we were simply oblivious to it.  We had landed in a neighbourhood inhabited mostly by Italians so perhaps that is why we were not confronted with this awareness right off the bat.  Instead we were learning a lot about other cultures.  For one thing, there was a lot of garlic around, something my mother had never cooked with.  To this day my mother’s cooking spices are salt, pepper and occasionally curry.  She finally learned to make garlic toast after 20 years in Canada. 

Interestingly enough, despite living in this Italian neighbourhood my mother did not learn anything at all about spaghetti.  Perhaps 5 years later we girls began seeing commercials for Chef Boyardee spaghetti products and began to plague Mom to buy it.  We thought it looked cool to twirl food around on a fork!  (I know, crazy reason to want to try a new food, eh?)  Finally she bought some spaghetti, however she had failed to understand that there was a special type of spaghetti sauce to go with it.  Instead, knowing it had to be red, we kids put ketchup on our spaghetti.  It is the only food I ever put ketchup on as otherwise I loathed the stuff.  We ate it that way for at least 10 years before Mom finally discovered Ragu sauce!

It’s funny the things we remember.  I don’t remember ever learning English, I don’t remember feeling like a foreigner, but I remember eating my first plate of spaghetti.  I was eleven!