Blurb:

In this paper, I take as the point of focus a now universally known and widely appreciated food item, namely spaghetti, both as a simple ingredient and as the label for associated composed dishes in which this form of pasta is featured. In particular I draw attention to the very complex set of relations and rules which govern its use within an endocuisine, that of Campania in southern Italy, a region in which spaghetti has been enjoyed for centuries and which served as a principal source of this food’s diffusion to other cultures. The goal is to illustrate not only the complexity of the rules surrounding a seemingly simple food in an endocuisine but also to demonstrate how these rules relate to other, deeper conceptual constraints in Campanian cuisine and the ways in which these rules and constraints imbue the food itself and dishes made with it with cultural meaning. A natural contrast suggests itself between Campanian and more generally Italian uses of spaghetti and those found in cultures where spaghetti is a relatively recent borrowing to mainstream foodways, such as the United States and Britain, but already is well along in the process of being nativized in highly adapted forms.