Was the spaghetti shown in early episodes of "The Waltons" period-accurate for rural Virginia during the Great Depression?
"The Waltons" is set on a fictional mountain in rural Virginia during the 1930s. In some early episodes, the family is shown eating spaghetti. I'm curious whether this would have been historically and geographically accurate for a working-class rural Appalachian family at that time.
A few specific things I'm wondering about:
- How common was spaghetti (or pasta generally) in rural Southern/Appalachian households during the 1930s? Was it something a family like the Waltons would realistically have eaten?
- Italian-American foodways were well established in urban areas with large Italian immigrant populations by the 1930s, and there is a rich history of Italy-adjacent immigrants in the northern WV coalfields, but how far had dried pasta spread into rural, non-Italian regions of the American South?
- Would dried pasta have been available and affordable through general stores or mail-order catalogs in an isolated mountain community during the Depression?
- If they did eat it, would the preparation have resembled what we'd recognize as "spaghetti and tomato sauce," or something different? I assume it would be something more in the bolognaise / meat gravy family.
Basically, is this a believable detail, or an anachronism/geographic mismatch the show's writers got wrong?
u/SpaceballsTheCritic — 10 days ago