Johnny Marzetti

Johnny Marzetti is an American baked casserole built from pasta, ground beef and vegetables in a tomato-based sauce, topped with cheese before baking. Cooks vary the recipe: some add mushrooms, some use cream of mushroom soup, tomato soup or tomato juice for the sauce, and in the former Panama Canal Zone green olives and celery went in as well. The dish is closely tied to Columbus, Ohio, where local legend credits the Italian restaurant founded by Teresa Marzetti in 1896, though the company has said its archives show no such dish and the link appears to have been made only after her death in 1972. Newspaper recipes in the Columbus Dispatch from the 1950s show the dish already circulating as a family favourite, and it became a fixture of school cafeterias and party tables across Ohio and the wider Midwest. It resembles American goulash and chili mac.