The Man, The Can: Recipes Of The Real Chef Boyardee
Did you know that Chef Boyardee was a real person? Yeah, totally a real guy. Here’s All Things Considered:
Unlike the friendly but fictional food faces of Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, Chef Boyardee — that jovial, mustachioed Italian chef — is real. Ettore “Hector” Boiardi (that’s how the family really spells it) founded the company with his brothers in 1928, after the family immigrated to America from Italy.
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The family settled in Cleveland, where they thought they could open a successful Italian restaurant. “They had a real understanding of food,” Boiardi says. It was a generation of people who “grew up in kitchens, so food was really their education.”
Chef Boiardi’s Restaurant in Cleveland was a success, and customers expressed interest in learning how to make Italian dishes at home. So the Boiardis started sending people home with pasta, sauce and cheese and teaching them how to cook, heat and assemble the dishes themselves.
That’s what got the family thinking: ” ‘What if we started jarring our sauce and selling it? Would it sell?’ ” Boiardi says. “That was really this germ of an idea … that eventually turned into Chef Boyardee.”
He even appeared in television ads. After watching this, I’m now going to put the accent on the second syllable of “Boyardee” and see how long it takes people to figure out what I’m talking about.