Spaghetti bolognese (意大利肉酱面) appeared to me during a Year 8 home science lesson. Our home teacher told the class to tie back our hair and start cutting the vegetables into pieces. Spaghetti bolognese made a world of difference to mealtimes.
This meal became a weekly food at our house - especially since the job of making spaghetti bolognese fell to me or one of my three sisters, giving my mother a break from cooking. But finding that this "Italian" food was mouth-wateringly delicious and could be made in our own kitchen, wasn't just happening at our house. In many places around the world, people were discovering just how delicious Italian food could be.
So by 2014, a survey done by the Germany-based company Apetito found that spaghetti bolognese was the third most popular dish eaten in their workplace cafeterias (自助餐厅). And in 2018, research in Britain to find out how new diets were changing what families ate at mealtimes, commissioned(委托)by British cooking appliance-maker Belling, discovered that spaghetti bolognese had won the competition and was the all-time favourite meal of Brits. "It has been interesting to see dishes, which we now consider very closely connected with family mealtimes, rising from relative unknown dishes, like everyone's favourite spag bol, to take the top place, " said a Belling spokesperson at the time. This Italian favourite isn't just popular in the West. In the 1980s, spaghetti bolognese was getting a workout in Malaysian home kitchens, according to chopinandmysaucepan. com, and is still often found on the menu of many local restaurants there.
However, not all Italians love what we've done to their cultural cuisine. Many pasta lovers rail at the idea that spaghetti bolognese is the same dish as ragù alla Bolognese, as it is known in Italy, or that it in fact comes from Bologna. In 2019, the then Bolognese mayor, Virginio Merola, started a debate on Twitter saying that it was not true that spaghetti bolognese originated from his great city. They believe the sauce should not be served with spaghetti.
