When: July 7
National Macaroni Day celebrates the iconic elbow pasta and its place in American food culture — from Thomas Jefferson importing a pasta machine from Naples, to macaroni and cheese becoming the country's most-eaten pasta dish. The macaroni in "Yankee Doodle" wasn't a joke about pasta — it was a reference to the height of fashionable European culture in the 1770s.
"Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni" — in 1775, calling something "macaroni" meant it was the height of European sophistication.
"Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni." The British wrote this song to mock American colonists during the Revolutionary War — and most Americans who sing it don't know what the joke means. In 1770s Britain, a "Macaroni" was a young man who had completed the Grand Tour of Europe and returned with exaggeratedly Continental fashions: tight breeches, enormous wigs, elaborate hats. To call something "macaroni" meant it was absurdly fashionable, European, and sophisticated. The British were saying: the Americans think a feather in a hat makes them worldly. They're calling it macaroni. They have no idea what they're doing. Americans adopted the song as their own and sang it proudly, which may have been the more sophisticated move. Macaroni itself is 12th-century Sicilian. The word likely comes from the Sicilian "maccarruni" — kneaded dough. Street vendors in 17th-century Naples sold pasta from stalls, and eating it by hand, twirling the tubes around the fingers,...