Milton Glaser’s Mother Makes Spaghetti

In the film about graphic design grand poobah Milton Glaser, Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight he talks about his Underground Gourmet column for New York magazine – collected in book form here – and the reason he became interested in cooking in the first place.

His mother’s spaghetti.

Mrs. Glaser would use a pound of Mueller’s spaghetti, because it sounded vaguely Jewish, rather than some of the more “ethnic” brands. She would dutifully boil it until there was no water left in the pan. To this she would add a bottle of Heinz ketchup and a half pound of Velveeta cheese and keep on cooking until it had congealed. Allowed to cool she would dump the lump out of the pan, slice it up and proceed to fry it in chicken fat.

Later when the budding young designer and illustrator was in art school he went to an Italian restaurant and ordered spaghetti. What arrived on his plate looked nothing like Mama Glaser had made. Long tendrils of pasta, topped with a rich sauce. “No, no, spaghetti, spaghetti. I wanted spaghetti.” The assurances from the waiter that this indeed was spaghetti clued him in to the possibility that food might be more than what his mother had prepared for him. It launched him on an odyssey to discover real food. In time he started writing about the many restaurants in New York, and did so for years.