Spaghetti Ice Cream: The Dessert That Looks Like Dinner

Kids love spaghetti. It’s messy, it’s fun, and slurping noodles somehow makes it even better. Now imagine putting a plate of spaghetti in front of a child, complete with red sauce and Parmesan, then handing them a spoon and saying, “Go ahead.” There’s just one problem: it isn’t spaghetti. It’s ice cream.

Spaghettieis is one of the great food illusions. Vanilla ice cream is pushed through a chilled press to create the “noodles,” strawberry sauce becomes the “tomato sauce,” and grated white chocolate plays Parmesan. It looks like dinner but tastes like dessert, and the story behind it is almost as good as the trick itself.

The story begins in Mannheim, Germany, in 1969, when 17-year-old Italian-German ice-cream maker Dario Fontanella was inspired by a dessert he encountered while skiing in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. The dessert, Mont Blanc, used chestnut purée pressed into thin strands. Fontanella wondered if he could do the same thing with ice cream.

Back in Mannheim, his first experiment wasn’t spaghetti. He was trying to create the Italian flag using pistachio, lemon and strawberry ice cream. His father reportedly pointed out that he’d never seen spaghetti in different colours, so Dario went back to work. Vanilla proved to be the perfect answer. One problem remained: ice cream melts. He eventually discovered that the press had to be extremely cold to produce the long, pasta-like strands.

The illusion was complete with strawberry sauce and white chocolate. Then came the kids. Some reportedly became upset because they had asked for ice cream and were suddenly confronted with what appeared to be a plate of spaghetti. Chef Boradee would probably be rolling in his grave and tunnelling his way back up for a bowl.

Then comes the question every inventor probably asks eventually: Did he make a fortune? Not from royalties. Fontanella never patented Spaghettieis, and other ice-cream parlours soon began copying the idea. In one sense, they put his invention on ice. But there was an upside: instead of keeping Spaghettieis locked inside one family business, the idea spread and became part of German ice-cream culture.

More than 50 years later, it remains a familiar sight in German ice-cream parlours and has spread into Austria and German-speaking Switzerland. Yet somehow, the rest of the world still hasn’t really caught up. A dessert this clever, simple and photogenic should be everywhere, from Montreal to Melbourne and New York to Tokyo. Instead, much of the world is still eating ordinary ice cream while Germany has been enjoying fake spaghetti for generations.

Germany figured this out more than 50 years ago. The rest of us are still catching up. And that’s our loss.

Nibbles

Ice cream was once a status symbol. Before refrigeration, making and storing ice was so difficult and expensive that frozen desserts were largely a luxury for royalty and the wealthy. Today, we complain when the scoop melts before we finish it.