Immigrant Spaghetti

For Farhan Mustafa, a tech product builder and former investigative journalist, spaghetti swaddled in a meaty tomato sauce electrified with spices like coriander, cumin, and turmeric was a regular recipe both at the family table and at mosque potlucks. But it wasn’t until recently that Mustafa, the child of North Indian immigrants, realized how special spaghetti has been to him and to so many others looking for a taste of home here in the South.

Story by Farhan Mustafa | Illustrations by Kristen Solecki

I’ll never forget the first time I had a taste of Ethiopian spaghetti. It was a balmy, late-spring night in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 2011, at the now-closed restaurant Queen of Sheba. Nearing closing time, the crew started dishing out its nightly staff meal. Owner Frieshgenet Dabei sat down at my table with a plate of spaghetti, and I caught a scent of tomato and berbere. I may have actually floated out of my seat like a cartoon character on a carpet of aromatics into the seat across from her. Without my having to ask, she explained that spaghetti is as popular as injera in Ethiopia, and sometimes they’ll even eat spaghetti on top of injera. She taught me how spaghetti was introduced by the Italians, who have a long history of violence in Ethiopia, during and following Italy's invasion and occupation of East Africa in the late 1930s and early ’40s. That influence now sat on Dabei’s plate, noodles swathed in a homemade tomato sauce with onions, garlic, berbere spice, ground beef, and green peppers. She’d incorporated the last ingredient when she moved to the South.

For the rest of the evening, my life in immigrant spaghettis flashed before my eyes. We loved having “Italian night” growing up. On those evenings, my mom, or Ammi as we called her, jacked up storebought Ragu or Prego with Indian spices like coriander, cumin, and a little turmeric, along with fried onions and garlic, green peppers, ground beef and denture-friendly soft noodles. We’d triumphantly carry a massive foil-wrapped loaf of garlic bread from Walmart or Kroger back home and pop it into the oven. Sometimes we’d also toss together an American salad with lettuce and baby carrots and bleu cheese dressing. I say American because otherwise our “salads” were either slices of cucumber, radishes, and carrots served separately like crudites; or just onions, tomatoes, cilantro, and a few sliced green chiles mixed together. While the garlic bread and bleu cheese-dressed salad sides never changed, my mom made the spaghetti different every time.

At Friday-night mosque potlucks in my hometown of Greenville, North Carolina, there would be even more versions of spaghetti. Our Egyptian friends, who lived down the street, made a dry version with vermicelli noodles redolent with more cinnamon, cardamom, and allspice, as well as finer ground beef, and the noodles way more al dente. Our Palestinian pals made a simple version with tomato puree, tomato paste, sweated onion and garlic, black pepper, parsley, and, of course, ground beef. I’d barely make it back to the tarps spread out on the floor with my sectioned Styrofoam plate (this was 1989) heaving with these international takes, along with rice dishes, curries, and salads, all crashing into each other and obliterating the plate’s false borders, the bright red and orange oils soaking through it onto my white kurta. Later, I’d see my Filipino friend slice hot dogs into noodles cloaked in a ketchup-based sauce with a little Maggi Seasoning. Our Nigerian friends’ jollof spaghetti might have been the most intense — woody and spicy. And the Southern spaghetti bake made by my best friend’s mom broke down to about 30 percent noodle and 70 percent ricotta cheese and sausage.

I’ve been in Seattle for the last two years, where my little brother Nanu, his wife, and my two amazing nieces live. As we talk about the community experiences my nieces are having, we find ourselves reminiscing about how much we loved those mosque potlucks. For a small college town in the rural South, it felt like a weekly international food festival. Modern community get-togethers these days tend to be catered by local businesses, food trucks, or pop-ups, which makes me feel like they’re missing out on tasting as many home kitchens as possible. Inevitably, we always bring it back to the different spaghettis we ate, which we now fondly call “immigrant spaghetti” — one name with infinite expressions. For me, immigrant spaghetti is a celebration of what makes all American tastes so personal and unique, immigrants or not.

Allow me a Bubba Gump-ish list of spaghettis that I have personally eaten in the U.S.: Jamaican jerk, rasta pasta; Dominican spaghetti called empaguetadas; Nigerian jollof spaghetti; Ethiopian, Eritrean, Somali suugo suqaar; Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Nepali spaghetti with tomato sauce, and Chinese-influenced versions based on ketchup; Filipino spaghetti with hot dogs; Egyptian spaghetti with shorter-than-normal vermicelli; Lebanese hashweh spaghetti; Southern AF baked spaghetti; Black spaghetti with lots of ground beef; meatless spaghetti with fried catfish; Korean spaghetti with a healthy kick of garlic and gochujang and cheese; yakamein (it often uses spaghetti, so I’m counting it); Creole spaghetti; Greek spaghetti; Memphis barbecue spaghetti; and Mexican spaghetti as interpreted by Southern white moms in community cookbooks. And let’s be clear: I’m not even talking about macaroni and cheese, because that’s a whole other dissertation. 

No two families, no matter where they’re from, make spaghetti that tastes the same — or any dish, for that matter. As much as my mom would mess around with Ragu, my aunt made a textbook-perfect Betty Crocker-adjacent baked rotini or macaroni with jarred sauce, ground beef, and Italian seasoning without ever having read a recipe in her life. In a time when we’re all having more nuanced (and necessary) conversations about cultural appropriation, spaghetti seems a safe canvas for everyone to paint on. Our approaches are unabashed and, I’d argue, free from shame or guilt. I’m not saying that we’re not offending anyone, just that we don’t feel the need to have a Twitter conversation about whether any group of people can have their own version of spaghetti. Maybe it’s like rock ’n’ roll? We all know where it really came from, but its impact has unspooled across the globe like so many spaghetti noodles twisting into exponentially different styles seasoned by those who play it. And remixed with even more influences and memories as time marches on. Somehow it belongs to everyone. Spaghetti does, too — arguably the most accessible food in the world, and not just because of its physical availability.

In his book Soul Food, the food historian Adrian Miller had this to say about that special case, mac and cheese, the first true breakout pasta hit in the United States, typically made with elbow macaroni (although also made with spaghetti in parts of New Orleans and Mississippi): “For soul food cooks, mac ’n’ cheese had multiple identities as rich people’s food, a special occasion food, a convenient comfort food, a meal-stretcher, and a poverty food.”

The same holds true for regular spaghetti with marinara sauce — from authentic Italian versions to the commercially bastardized American ones. It allowed us to express our own evolving American identities, whether families immigrating to the South in the 1980s or Italian, Black, and Creole families in the early 1900s.

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To really understand how spaghetti grew the way it did across the South, I decided to learn where this proverbial melting pot started boiling. I spoke to Liz Williams, author of Nana’s Creole Italian Table: Recipes and Stories From Sicilian New Orleans, a book packed with historical nuance and family stories of immigration and identity, particularly how southern Italy and the American South share common cultural threads.

New Orleans became home for the majority of Italians immigrating to the South; roughly 64,000 settled here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most came from southern Italy and Sicily. After Giuseppe Garibaldi unified Italy in the early 1860s, southern Italy became an agrarian center meant to feed the factories in the northern part of the country. Southern Italians flocked to the cities and took their dried pastas with them. In his book Dinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal, Andreas Viestad posits that this migration of pasta across Italy was the real spur to cultural unification, as Italians were finally eating something in common.

After reunification, southern Italy was giving up more food to the effort and didn’t have much left over. The region was hungry for sustenance and for opportunity. America was an option for those with relatives or other connections. New Orleans was a mecca for Italian immigrants, but wherever they settled, New Orleans or New York City, they usually lived side-by-side with the lowest socioeconomic classes that were already there (or recently arrived). In New York City, that meant living near Irish and Chinese immigrants; in the South, that mostly meant living with Black people. After the Civil War, the Louisiana Bureau of Immigration recruited laborers from Sicily to replace formerly enslaved people. Hundreds of Italian men lived in abandoned cabins where enslaved people once lived. Sicilians and Black people worked in sugar cane, cotton, and strawberry fields together.

In New Orleans’ storied Tremé neighborhood, they lived, played, and ate together. They shared plates of food and incorporated recipes. Spaghetti was being passed around, replicated and personalized as more tasted it. By the 1930s, in both New Orleans and Harlem, Black patrons became big customers of spaghetti houses. Recipes for spaghetti appeared in Black community cookbooks, and Italian food took off in Black neighborhoods across the country.

Perhaps the most important twist in the tale of immigrant spaghetti is the eventual commodification and mass availability of spaghetti and tomato sauce. In Massimo Montanari’s A Short History of Spaghetti With Tomato Sauce, he documents how southern Italy’s warmer climate meant that farmers there could grow better varieties of wheat purpose-built for dried pasta. Once it became shelf-stable, dried pasta quickly became ubiquitous. And thanks to advances in safe canning, tomato sauce became widely available, too. Nutritionally, it met many needs cheaply. Those tastes eventually got transferred here, and with economical and plentiful spaghetti, Black folks decided to use spaghetti noodles for things like mac and cheese and, much later, yakamein. Williams makes a clear distinction, however, between Italian tomato sauce and what became distinctly, and still is, a New Orleans thing: Creole red gravy, which begins with a roux plus the holy trinity of celery, green bell pepper, and onion.

In my TV-addled mind, a strong memory of Dom DeLuise lingers. Specifically, his cooking demonstrations along with “Italian night”-themed advertising wars when Prego and Ragu decided to chunk up their sauces in the 1990s. These are the sauces I learned to doctor up with coriander, cumin, turmeric, a lot more garlic, and ground beef that I would then pile on top of spaghetti alongside garlic bread. I was curious how Williams, an Italian-American, felt about the concept of “Italian night.” After a thoughtful pause, she said she guessed it felt nice that people cared, but it never felt like cultural appropriation. It meant some sense of acceptance. Personally, she didn’t experience the awareness of being an “other” but knows that her mother and grandmother did. Her mother prepared her to avoid that discrimination, as a protective instinct. Ultimately, she said, if your food gets accepted into the canon of American food, then you’re a part of it.

I asked Miller the Italian-night question, too. He said his mother often made spaghetti and marinara with beef, and even calzones. And while they were her recipes, it always felt intentionally like they were having Italian food. It didn’t feel like soul food in the way macaroni and cheese did. Meanwhile, one of my oldest friends, Mandrill Taylor, said the spaghetti they ate was definitely considered a family recipe, and to him that made it taste like soul food, not something inspired by commercials. He grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, but his parents and extended family are from Taylor County, Kentucky. Their fascinating family spaghetti recipe evolution started off as a salad of chopped tomatoes and onions with rice. They eventually replaced the rice with spaghetti. The next stop was just replacing the chopped tomatoes and onions with sauce. His aunt makes a punchy, soupy one with ground beef, but they refer to it as “more like chili with spaghetti.” Not for nothing is Taylor County roughly 170 miles from Cincinnati, home of distinct chili parlors where you can get a Greek-influenced sauce served over pasta, and, if you want, onions, cheese, and beans (what’s colloquially called a “5-way”).

• • •

After the Southern Foodways Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi, this past October, chef Ricky Moore’s fried catfish with gravy and onions alongside jollof spaghetti (more on that dish later) loomed heavily in my mind. It was the first I’d heard of the combo, which meant, sadly, that I was decades late to the party. Catfish and spaghetti is indeed a thing, as spaghetti is an expected side dish at many Southern barbecues, church suppers, and family potlucks.

I was eager to learn more about catfish and spaghetti but especially that jollof spaghetti. Moore, the 2022 James Beard Best Chef: Southeast, said he first found catfish and spaghetti (also served with corn) while serving as executive chef and instructor at the South Shore Cultural Center in Chicago. His students lived in the surrounding neighborhood, and being new to the area, he’d venture out with them to see what they were eating and cooking. He learned that the catfish spaghetti duo came up with families on the Mississippi River during the Great Migration. He tasted both meat and meatless versions of spaghetti, the common connection being that the pasta was always overcooked and soft. “It occurred to me that people treated spaghetti like rice, and once I thought of that, it was easy to start trying new things with it but also understand why the dish itself existed.” He and his students started talking more about the regionality of dishes like spaghetti, and they even practiced a culinary exploration, starting with a “mother” spaghetti recipe and moving into versions like jambalaya spaghetti.

Around the same time, I started my own pasta explorations. I was in my mid-20s, living in Washington, D.C., and going through a rite of passage for many children of immigrants: cooking what your mom did, but with your own variations. I was living with two Pakistani roommates, one of whom would desi-fy any dish, often unnecessarily. I was no purist by any means, just unapologetically more American in my tastes. I insisted we go to a Golden Corral buffet, an hour’s drive away, on my birthday every year even though I was the only one who actually enjoyed the food. For my international crew, I began to make spaghetti and meatballs, with the latter more resembling kofta, South Asian meatballs deftly spiced with garlic, ginger, fried onions, hints of clove and black cardamom, and, my own addition, dried mint. I also made chicken tikka masala pasta, already a fairly creamy tomato-based dish, and the best bolognese I’ve ever had in my life after tweaking a recipe from a 2002 issue of Gourmet and simmering it for over eight hours.

Moore’s wife is from the D.C. area, and they lived there after he graduated from the Culinary Institute of America. He worked at legendary spots like Galileo before opening up Equinox with chefs Todd and Ellen Gray. Living in D.C. myself at the time, I’d unwittingly been tasting his creations all over town. Especially at Le Tarbouche, a Lebanese restaurant where he cooked for a few years and that I’d often visit with friends. There he came up with an all-spaghetti version of a rice dish called hashweh, traditionally a one-pot rice dish made with ground or minced beef (or lamb), toasted nuts, and, very often, broken vermicelli. It can be eaten as a side dish, main dish, or even stuffed into chicken, which is how my Palestinian friend’s mom did it. Each bite of Moore’s version was layered in flavor thanks to toasted garlic, cinnamon, and allspice, and I could immediately feel the weight of that foam potluck plate in my hand. Looking back, it feels like that scene from “Interstellar” when (spoiler alert) we find out Anne Hathaway was actually touching Matthew McConaughey’s hand from the past as they neared the black hole in the present. It does make sense that if anything can both time-travel and defy circular logic, it’s the humble noodle.

As of 2019, the D.C. metro was home to the third-largest African immigrant population in the U.S.; for some time it has been home to one of the largest Ethiopian populations in this country. It’s there that Moore explored both East and West African tastes from restaurants and new friends’ homes. By the time he presented his jollof spaghetti to the SFA crowd in Oxford in 2022, it had been decades in the making. He wanted to honor that spaghetti tradition, especially down in Mississippi, where it evolved and spread north. He also wanted to bring forward his favorite flavors from the African diaspora. But his most personal inspiration for the dish was something quintessentially American: good ol’ Rice-A-Roni. “I remember eating my mom’s doctored-up Rice-A-Roni as a kid,” Moore said, “but that rice itself … how the tomato was browned to a deep tomato flavor and how that speckled reddish-brown color coated every grain — I really loved that nutty flavor profile, and it was on my mind.” He said that people who love to cook also often love to latch onto things to make their own. It’s easy to dress pasta in curiosity and homage.

Doctoring up Rice-A-Roni, macaroni and cheese, instant ramen, and Lipton pasta mixes binds home cooks of all backgrounds. By the age of 5, I was making instant ramen on the stovetop and hacking broccoli and cheese that I’d seen in the school cafeteria. Microwaving frozen crowns and melting orange American slices on top was a “recipe” I learned out of necessity, as my aunt, who had just come from India, was babysitting me at the time and I knew she wouldn’t know how to feed a growing American kid like me. At 14, I learned about the existence of pesto after I found an old Knorr “pesto seasoning” packet in the back of our pantry. On instinct, I added it to some Ragu tomato sauce, and my world changed. It was one of those food memories that split the world into what you knew and what was possible.

The restaurant in Chapel Hill where I first tasted Ethiopian spaghetti is long gone, but I did reconnect with the flavors of that first bite with the Desta family in Atlanta. They own Kategna, located off Buford Highway, the city’s international hub, where restaurants reflecting every corner of the globe line the seven lanes of traffic. When I spoke with Obinne “Obi” Baker, an employee there, about wanting to learn more about Ethiopian spaghetti and immigrant spaghettis in general, she lit up and offered her own story.

As did Kategna owner Sinidu Desta, endearingly known as Nani, who said it was a no-brainer to put spaghetti on the menu here because of its popularity back home. The chefs at Kategna are all women, born and raised in Ethiopia. Each has her own version of the dish and couldn’t imagine a home table, let alone a restaurant one, without it. Baker describes Kategna’s spaghetti as tasting like American meat sauce with standout spices like cardamom and cloves. They add sauteed vegetables like cabbage and carrots. They also have a few protein options, including berbere-spiced salmon, chicken, or tibs, which is Ethiopian chopped lean beef. Naturally, spaghetti stands out as familiar to those customers who may be hesitant to jump head-first into the country’s complex cuisine — though while we chatted, an Ethiopian customer came in and ordered the spaghetti with chicken. 

Baker’s mother, a Nigerian immigrant to the U.S., would make jollof spaghetti for her when she was young, but it was too spicy for Baker’s taste. She fondly remembered the first time she had non-Nigerian spaghetti, in the cafeteria in elementary school. It was just tomato sauce and soft noodles and cheese. “It had, like, no spices and was so bland, so great. I loved the simplicity compared to what I ate.” I asked Baker for her mom’s jollof spaghetti recipe and she said it’s different every single time — you make it with what you have. That’s how Africans do it. She did offer up her own recipe, though. She, like past generations of immigrants, didn’t have any measurements, just instinct. “I know how to gauge it with my eyes because I saw my mom making it and remember how it looks. So I don’t measure anything, I just know how it should look and smell at each step.”

Baker is continuing the fine tradition of “dump cooking.” It’s a phrase my little brother and I toss around nearly every time we talk about cooking. Dump cooking is without measurements, using just instincts and memories as your guide. We’ll use it to describe when it’s clear there’s no actual recipe for what we made. For example: “How’d you make the spaghetti this time?” “Oh, just dump, but basically more fennel and less cumin than usual.” Nanu and I cook a lot of each other’s creations, but I can’t remember a single time where we’ve ever traded a recipe. Just notes on variations, as if it’s a piece of music.

• • •

There’s a whole branch of immigrant spaghetti recipes that veer off from the “marinara” base to ketchup instead. While you’ll see plenty of American recipes that call for adding ketchup to tomato sauce or paste, you’ll often find ketchup as the only tomato component in spaghetti recipes across South, Southeast, and East Asian families. Think Filipino spaghetti, made with sweet banana ketchup, or Japanese Spaghetti Napolitan, where the stir-fried ketchup takes on a deeper, almost sun-dried profile. While my North Indian family often used Prego, most other South Asian families we knew would go the ketchup-and-soy-sauce route, to replicate the more familiar Indo-Chinese flavors from back home. You might even have seen dishes like “hakka noodles” or “chow mein” on an Indian restaurant menu.

Sumeyya Malik was born and raised in Middletown, Maryland, before moving first to Pakistan and then to North Carolina. Her mom would make a dish known back in Pakistan as “Chinese macaronis” (yes, the plural form is intentional). South Asian noodle dishes in this China-influenced vein are based on ketchup, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, and vegetables like onions, carrots, cabbage, green peppers, and, of course, lots of hot chiles. Thing is, Malik hated it. Much like Baker, she preferred the bland simplicity of jarred sauce and noodles and, for Malik, some cream cheese mixed in, too. In fact, when they’d visit family in Pakistan, they’d take jars of Prego just to meet her desire for a gentler taste. A few years later, they moved there and took as many jars as they could. After her supply ran out, however, Malik was forced to eat Chinese macaronis. “For some reason, eating it there, it was love at first sight. I never touched American pasta sauce again.” When Malik moved back to the U.S., she resisted American pasta sauce for years. If she has to have it, she can only enjoy it by adding chili garlic sauce and lots of extra pepper.

Every South Asian family I know has its own version of “Chinese macaronis,” mine included. You’ll often find it on expanded Indian restaurant menus as hakka noodles, Szechuan noodles, or even just chow mein. By the 1930s, Chinese noodle dishes were appearing in Black cookbooks as well. You can still find yakamein all across New Orleans, made with spaghetti noodles, rice noodles, instant ramen, and more.

• • •

Spaghetti has offered a box of possibilities for people from nearly every culture across the world. A blank slate that will absorb any flavor you throw at it. So accessible and affordable that everyone has an instinct to make it their own.

In this era of “identity politics,” we’re all hyper-aware of the cultures and groups we’re a part of and how they’re evolving. While it seems those fighting the so-called culture wars are doing their best to either amplify or erase identities outside our homes (or even inside them), our kitchens remain intensely personal spaces in which to privately play and express. Where we’re not even cooking so much as practicing instincts. We can access, re-create, and taste decades-old memories in minutes with nothing more than a box of spaghetti and a jar of sauce or a few condiments or spices in the pantry. In between the noodles’ bends and curves nestle memories, journeys, learnings, aspirations, personalities, and necessities. And while immigrant spaghetti isn’t unique to the South, I don’t know if there’s another place in the world where it unfurls so many stories so beautifully.

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