The San Francisco Treat
Several months ago I happened to ask my wife to make some Rice-A-Roni for me for dinner. Neither she nor her brother (who was helping with the cooking) took the request literally and they ended up making rice with some spices and other additions that seemed to them to be a far fresher and more interesting dish than anything that might come out of a box. Rice-A-Roni was invented sixty years ago by the sons of an Italian produce store owner, who built a local pasta company. One of them had sampled an Armenian dish that blended rice and vermicelli pasta and after throwing in a dried chicken soup mix, decided it was a treat that needed to be marketed nationally. Pasta has always been a local or regional business (presumably for freshness and branding purposes). This new rice and macaroni dish was branded as Rice-A-Roni and the marketing played on its San Francisco heritage by declaring it “the San Francisco Treat” and accentuated by a ringing cable car bell. Today, Rice-A-Roni is owned by PepsiCo. (via their acquisition of Quaker Oats Company, the owner of the brand) and the twelve flavors that are available are all flavorful and savory.
The study of advertising should include a chapter on Rice-A-Roni. The TV ads for Rice-A-Roni must have repetitively run over and over because the sound of that woman singing, “Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat. The flavor can’t be beat!” still rings in my ears. What else do you need to know?
The older I get, the more finicky my palate and digestive system gets. One of the best examples, as I fly back from my visit in San Francisco to my home (at least for a few more months) in New York City, is that of the ubiquitous street food carts that cook up and sell Biryani rice, pita, felafels, shush-kabobs and gyro meat. These small carts expel vast quantities of savory and flavorful aromas and I find them hard to pass without my saliva glands getting a work-out. Some times those aromas overwhelm me and I buy a dish of chicken or gyro meat on a pita with white sauce and rice. The rice comes off of a griddle where falafels, chicken, gyro meat, pitas, onions and peppers all sizzle away. I don’t know what spices are added to this yellow/orange-colored rice. What I know for a fact is that the overwhelmingly alluring smell of these ethnic foods always lures me onto the perilous rocks of eating things that don’t agree with my increasingly delicate stomach. What a conundrum. I must walk by a half-dozen of these Biryani food carts every day. I know better and forty-nine out of fifty times, I walk by with steeled resolve, but there is that one time when I am overcome with longing for something that smells that savory.
It’s interesting to note that flavorful Biryani rice from a food cart is not unlike the rice served in many Indian restaurants. We just ordered from such an Indian restaurant on Monday night and they sent a whole bucket of chicken-flavored rice. It was not as toxic as the food cart rice, but it invoked a digestive skull and crossbones for my system nonetheless. Mexican food also comes often with rice (and usually either black beans or refried beans), and that rice is generally orange-colored, but is somehow not usually so spicy or toxic. In fact, my perception is that Mexican rice is rather bland and not particularly flavorful. The savory and flavorful aspect of a plate of most Mexican food seems to come more from the meat, vegetables and sauces. The best evidence of this is that Mexican food is usually served with available hot sauce condiments to spice-up the meal. The tortillas, rice and beans are more the “ballast” of an otherwise spicy meal.
My point in reviewing the global rice menu like this is to point out that many meals from many cultures include rice and that this rice ranges from bland and mild as a white starch and extremely spicy and doctored as a boost to the exotic nature of the meal. It seems to me that there is an important middle ground in the world of rice as a adjuncts dish for meals. I do not think that food products grow and gain traction for no reason at all. Certainly there are parts of the world that need foodstuffs like rice just to add nutritional value that is otherwise lacking. In that case they are dietary staples. But western cultures have a much broader choice of adjunct dishes to choose from to formulate their meals. In some, mostly tropical, areas, food spicing is done for preservation and to induce sweating for cooling purposes, so it can have a very practical intent well beyond any cultural palate preferences alone. Here in the land of refrigeration and air conditioning, we tend to eat whatever our palate prefers (or occasionally…not so much by me…what we perceive as healthy). Some prefer bland and some prefer spicy, but it is a spectrum.
Based on the sale of Rice-A-Roni for sixty years, the successful sale of the brand to two big-league food companies and the expansion from one to twelve flavors, I think its fair to suggest that there are lots and lots of Americans who enjoy eating the San Francisco Treat. In fact, choosing it over potatoes of any style, plain rice, spicy rice, stuffing, yams or any other form of starch dish to complement a green vegetable selection, must mean that there is an important niche to be filled by this product. I feel very righteous in my preference for Rice-A-Roni, whether it comes out of a box or not. Whether it is an “old” processed versus fresh product or not, I like it and am not feeling that “freshness” or “newness” needs to be considered in selecting a starch. Many starches are valuable to human nutrition because they keep over time and can be stored for off-season consumption. Freshness need not be a standard. And as for how contemporary Rice-A-Roni is as a product, most starches have been with us much longer than sixty years and many spices are packaged to be stored, so the packaged and mid-century aspect of this dish is irrelevant.
I have just come from San Francisco and I did not eat any Rice-A-Roni. I ate rice several times at more upscale restaurants and ordered in “an Indian”, as they say in London, with rice, and none of them satisfied me as much as a serving of the simple yet perfectly balanced Rice-A-Roni would have. Rice-A-Roni will always be my leading San Francisco Treat.