Burnt My Fingers

Today’s Rice-A-Roni offers a myriad of flavors. Their website suggests you combine them to make your own recipe! Photo by Boereck, reproduced under Creative Commons.

I had disdain for Rice-A-Roni when I lived in San Francisco. How dare they put a cable car on their box and pound our ears with a jingle that called it “the San Francisco Treat”? I equated the packaged mix with Hamburger Helper—artificial, probably not good for you and completely at odds with the healthy vibe of my home town.

Aaron Peskin, a former president of the Board of Supervisors, felt the same way. “I don’t mean to sound like a snob,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006, “but I don’t make anything out of a box.” But it turns out our contempt was misplaced. Rice-A-Roni is a San Francisco native by way of an immigrant kitchen, and a sterling example of the multicultural tolerance and cooperation that make the city great.

Lois De Domenico was the wife of a guy who ran a pasta company with his brother. In the 1940s they lived in a small apartment in the Mission, where they shared kitchen privileges with their landlady. One day the landlady asked if Tom, her husband, could bring home some vermicelli from the factory. She had them break the pasta into rice-length pieces which she then sautéed along with rice and cooked in chicken stock.

This modified pilaf was delicious and the De Domenicos began developing a shelf-stable version for mass distribution. They also had a marketing strategy: they would come up with a catchy name and slogan and blanket grocery shelves with their product before the big guys like General Mills and Kraft could develop their own version. And they hired a local ad agency, McCann-Erickson, which came up with the slogan and the cable car motif.

The rest, of course, is history. At one time a third of all American households ate Rice-A-Roni, and generations grew up with the jingle embedded in their heads. In the 1990s Quaker bought the brand, and immediately got rid of the San Francisco theme. A De Domenico relative told the Chronicle she believed they did it because San Francisco had a national image as a place that was just a little too racy for a family product. Of course, this bowdlerization didn’t last. Today the cable car is back, emblazoned on new flavors like Four Cheese Rice-A-Roni.

But we’re not done with this history, because where did that landlady get the idea of combining rice and pasta in pilaf? Dedicated readers of this site will recognize Armenian Pilaf, as did Brian B who won a box of Ghirardelli chocolates for identifying the connection. NPR’s Kitchen Sisters, with help from Lois De Domenico, located the grandson of Pailadzo Captanian. “Grandma Cap” had been deported as part of the Armenian Genocide in 1915, lost her husband and was separated from her children, trekked across Turkey and Syria and finally reached America where she would tell Lois stories of her struggles while they cooked together.

Grandma Cap’s pilaf is still a tradition in the Captanian family where Jacqueline, the wife of another grandson, is charged with making it for gatherings. The Kitchen Sisters shared her upgraded recipe which includes mushrooms (canned, of course), onion and a spoonful of pine nuts.

When the Kitchen Sisters recorded their episode in 2008, Lois De Domenico was still making pilaf the way Pailadzo Captanian had taught her. “I only lived there four months, but it was four months that brought all these things together: myself from Canada; Tommy, Italian; Mrs. Captanian, Armenian. All that converging in San Francisco in 1946, and out of that comes Rice-A-Roni.”