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For Black cooks, spaghetti represents connection and ingenuity

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October 18, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. EDT
(Joanna Turner/For The Washington Post)

A mound of ground beef, squishy in my hands and cold to the touch, sizzles when it hits the hot Dutch oven, conjuring dreams of the spaghetti dish to come.

I shower it with my pick of seasonings — a green cloud of dried oregano, tablespoons of onion and garlic powders, coriander, kosher salt, freshly cracked pepper — and the transcendent combination of onions and garlic turns translucent as they melt into the olive oil, fatty meat and a spattering of butter.

There is never a time when this smell, hitting my nostrils and dancing down into my spirit, doesn’t feel like comfort, feel like reassurance, feel like coming home.

My Dad died in the fall of last year, and after his death my interest in cooking and eating evaporated. For months, days stretched longer than ever with no meals to punctuate the passing of time. Most of the time, all I could muster was the energy to make was a gigantic pot of spaghetti for myself and my family, food to nourish us during those early days of grieving.

For most Black people in this country, spaghetti, whether with meat sauce, a simple marinara or with meatballs rolled between our palms, has signified something beyond being affordable and easy to make — especially for large groups of people. It’s more than adapting a dish from the Italian American immigrants who came here during the late 19th century and cemented the dish into the American lexicon. Yes, there’s some “spaghetti in there,” as the often-shared video and meme celebrate, but Black people have turned it into something we could call our own.

The most profound thing about Black folk’s spaghetti is that depending on the family of origin, something that seems so simple can be made quite differently. This is no vat of unseasoned meat sauce. No barely covered noodles. Black spaghetti is saucy and flavored boldly.

In my family, we always used Ragú ready-made sauce in glass jars with the emblematic stop light yellow metal top — my Mom was quite fond of the chunky garden vegetable variety. In my mind, she had four kids and any excuse to sneak in an extra serving of veggies undetectable to a child’s palate was a win. A close friend recently remarked that her family was a Prego family. And others may grab the bargain Hunt’s pasta sauce in cans or opt to make their own with a mixture of crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, tomato paste and whatever else.

The more you talk about spaghetti with friends or family, the more you learn about the variations. To me, this is the essence of Black ingenuity: taking something we learned about from another place and another culture, appreciating it, making it our own with a particular spin or twist. The endless iterations of spaghetti that Black people have had their hands on — Nigerian spaghetti, Haitian spaghetti, Dominican spaghetti, Somali spaghetti, among others — is the epitome of this creativity.

But we also see this in the American regional variations of spaghetti: Midwesterners from Detroit or Chicago and those down South in Mississippi won’t let you get too far in any discussion without noting that spaghetti with fried fish — usually catfish battered with cornmeal — and a slice of white sandwich bread is a delicacy.

Cemented in my family’s running list of meals we make time and time again, spaghetti is special. And we are not alone. When I posed a question on Twitter as I was writing and researching for this piece, my mentions and DMs were flooded with anecdotes from Black people all over this country confirming what I had already assumed.

L’Oreal Thompson Payton, a wellness journalist for Fortune Magazine and author of “Stop Waiting for Perfect,” which is scheduled to be released in 2023, shared that when she was in postpartum recovery, spaghetti got her and her husband through as they bonded with their newborn daughter, Violet.

“My dad’s go-to meal when it was his turn to cook at the fire station was spaghetti (lucky for us he’d make the same size portions for our family of 4),” she said. “In turn, it’s become my go-to comfort meal and was the first thing I asked for when I got home from the hospital after giving birth.”

Shelley Fort, an actor and producer based in Los Angeles, too found that spaghetti was elemental in her family during a time of grief.

“After my Mom died, my Dad had to rebound quick,” she said. “I’d come home after track practice or piano lessons or rehearsal and he’d have a pot of sauce (from a jar) and spaghetti. Mom was a vegetarian, so he always added meatless sausages. Simple but home.”

There are African Diaspora renditions, too. I knew about Dominican spaghetti, a favorite when heading to the beach. Families and friends, aunties and cousin, gather all their beach essentials before loading up in cars, including Tupperware containers and pots full of spaghetti speckled with green, yellow and red bell peppers, capers, pitted green olives, tomato sauce and evaporated milk to make it creamy. Often chunks of salami are added in, too. And once at the beach, a mound of saucy noodles lay tangled on Styrofoam plates.

Ifrah Ahmed, a Somali writer and chef, acknowledges that for her, spaghetti is inextricably tied with a legacy of colonialism, referring to Italy’s colonization of Somalia from 1889 to 1960. Despite that, when she reflects on what spaghetti means for her and her family, she can hold warm memories brimming with nostalgia.

“I make spaghetti all the time, and pasta as a whole is my favorite,” she said. “I love that we Somalis took what was the food of our colonizer and made it even better. [It is] still one of the easiest and most filling meals to make, in my mind. It will always remind me of the care my mother put into feeding us, especially as she navigated being a working parent and a newly arrived refugee.”

Somali spaghetti combines cumin, coriander and cilantro, Ahmed says. Her mother often served a Somali dish called busteeki, essentially thinly sliced steak alongside spaghetti. And of course, there are other dishes that combine those essential ingredients the Somali way like lasagna, tuna spaghetti and dalac bilaash, a tomato sauce including garlic, onions, cilantro and, of course, tomatoes.

There’s also Haitian spaghetti, combining spaghetti noodles, tomato paste, green and red peppers, hot dogs or smoked sausage finished with a fiery habanero pepper for a finishing heat. And Nigerian spaghetti: think of all the aromatics that make jollof rice and Nigerian stew something to crave over and over again with red onion, pulpy Roma tomatoes, garlic and Maggi cubes. In the South, baked spaghetti is another form of spaghetti I’ve always loved. It’s an easy way to use up days old spaghetti with a topping of cheese, browned and bubbly from the oven.

For some people, spaghetti may be just another dish — an affordable option for lunch or dinner when inspiration or money runs low. But for Black people, it represents connection, the pursuit of creativity that drives us to make things our own and how, when we do so, we create memories that keep our stomachs satiated and our souls at peace.