Sunday Rerun: He got canned

The topic of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee came up the other morning on the Howard Stern show, so I had to research the old chef to find out what his story was.

And as with anything covered with tomato sauce, it's fascinating!

First off, Howard said that he was an avid consumer of the Chef's canned meatball and pasta products. He said his mother would be in the kitchen making wonderful meatballs, sauce, and pasta, and old Howard would go into the kitchen, open a can of C B-A-D noodles, and heat it up, gobbling it in front of his mom as a form of teenage rebellion.

Can you just imagine? I ate canned pasta once in my life and had a pre-teenage rebellion.  I think I stood up and hollered, "I ain't eating this slop!" while tossing my plate like I had seen George Raft do in the movies.

All right, I didn't throw my plate, but I definitely balked at consuming canned pasta. As I recall, it tasted like rubber bands floating in catsup. Not good. But for all I know, it's a whole lot tastier now, yessir. Si, signore.

As Howard's sidekick (and former student of mine) Robin Quivers pointed out, the chef must have been a pretty good cook in his day. Turns out the man born Ettore (Hector) Boiardi in Piacenza, Italy in 1897 came to America in 1914 and worked in the kitchen in the Plaza Hotel in New York, rising to the position of head chef. In short order he moved to Cleveland to open his own restaurant, Il Giardino d'Italia (The Garden of Italy.)

Sometimes, the combination of timing, luck and talent results in huge success. By the time the Depression hit, Hector's restaurant was doing very well, and people just loved his tomato sauce. Loved it. So much so that they asked him for sauce to take home, and he began using washed-out milk bottles and filling them with his sauce as favors to customers.

That was the talent, making that red gravy. Luck and timing came in because the early 1930s saw a lot of people losing their jobs and savings due to foolish national economic policy during the 20s. So, pasta became an affordable meal for many, and Chef Boiardi started making sauce for sale.

The only problem then was, no one could figure out how the hell to pronounce "Boiardi," and the chef said, "Let's go phonetic," and rechristened his brand "Chef Boy-Ar-Dee."

What's more, his company made a lot of canned food for GIs during World War II, and many of those soldiers and sailors came home and brought their Army can opener (left) with them, thereby staving off starvation until they got married. They purchased canned chow by the truckload.


Chef Boy-Ar-Dee appeared in television ads for many years, and at his death in 1985, his pasta and sauce cans were selling to the tune of $500 million per year.

So there you have it, and if you like his food, it's still available. If you'd like some real homemade pasta sauce, come on over one night and I'll share Vic Damone's recipe with you, and even cook you up some.

Tomorrow, let's talk about a man who changed the world for sufferers of indigestion. As luck would have it, his name was Al Kaseltzer.