Over time, all sorts of rumors, legends, myths and of course hoaxes have flourished around Italian cuisine. One of them has literally made history: the hoax of spaghetti growing on treesa joke that thousands of rather naive English citizens fell for.
April 1st 1957the BBCBritain’s leading television station, broadcast one of the most famous April Fools’ pranks ever devised. It aired a fake documentary about the extraordinary tree that gives birth to spaghetti! On the television programme “Panorama”, viewers were shown a short film depicting a family from Italian-speaking Switzerland busy picking spaghetti from trees in their garden.
This prank, devised by cameraman Charles de Jaeger, exploited the widespread ignorance in Great Britain about pasta, which at the time was considered a truly exotic food. The English only knew about canned spaghetti, without ever having investigated further into its origins.
There was a lot of mistrust towards the “obscure” first Italian restaurants opened by immigrants in the suburbs and almost no British citizen had the courage to go in. Just as there were not many who could afford to dine at the famous Spaghetti House in London, the first Italian restaurant opened in 1955 in central London. The joke had hit the mark!
The documentary, narrated by Richard Dimbley, a historic voice of English TV, described in detail the cultivation of spaghetti, emphasizing the difficulties related to winter frosts and the dedication of farmers. The credibility of the narrator and the quality of the production meant that many viewers really believed in the existence of such trees, so much so that the BBC switchboards were bombarded with many calls from people curious to know how to grow them at home.
The operators had been trained in advance to play the part and carried out the prank, thus answering gullible English citizens who were supposed to put a “sprig” of spaghetti in a jar of tomato sauce, cross their fingers and wait for it to sprout. The result was that thousands of English people tried to grow their own spaghetti tree. While the spaghetti tree hoax is the most sensational that British citizens have fallen for, it must be said that it is only one of many.
Many English people have a bizarre and distorted view of Italian cuisine and, in addition to believing that spaghetti grows on trees, they are convinced that we Italians eat enormous quantities of garlic bread, fried mozzarella sticks, pasta with chicken and other such absurdities. Not only that. They are also convinced that the Marsala is a typically English wine (!).
Simply because it has been imported from Sicily for so long that they have come to convince themselves that they invented it. Every time an English newspaper criticizes Italian cuisine, smile and remember that in England they believe that spaghetti grows on trees.