Yankee Doodle, as the story goes, stuck a feather in his cap and called it “macaroni.” Loads of kids in the US learn this song and wonder what the heck the pasta reference is doing there, because it doesn’t seem to make any sense.
It doesn’t make any sense nowadays because back in the 1700s “macaroni” had another meaning besides “pasta,” but that meaning has completely disappeared today. Well, not completely — it’s still mentioned in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” — but its inclusion in the song hasn’t been enough to keep that old meaning alive, even though there are multiple clues in the song itself.
First of all, the phrase “Yankee Doodle Dandy” includes “dandy,” which is still a word for someone who’s shallow, silly, and more concerned about what they’re wearing than about much else. In 1700s England, there was a bit of a craze for young men from wealthy families to travel in Europe and adopt continental clothes, food preferences and mannerisms. They weren’t organized or probably even aware of each other, but were collectively called the “macaroni club.”
“Macaroni” was used as a term of ridicule for those wealthy young Britons for a couple of reasons. One was that it’s just an amusing word to say. But another is that there was another well-known term then: “macaronic,” which meant a form of comic verse (usually performed live) that mixed terms from different languages. The word — and the form — were invented by Teofilo Folengo, an Italian poet from the 1600s, whose performances were said to be an early form of burlesque theater. He would mix up Italian and Latin words, and by all reports made his audience roar with laughter.
Since the young English dandies were also mixing together elements from other cultures, if not languages, their behavior was also called “macaronic,” and that’s where the term “Macaroni Club” came from. Keep in mind that although “macaroni” was ALSO a pasta, and Folengo based his term on that, hardly anybody in England had even heard of pasta at the time. The English word “macaroni” in those days primarily meant a silly mix of cultures and languages, and only secondarily referred to food.
The British folks who opposed the North American colonists insisting on independence knew all about the day’s primary meaning of “macaroni,” and also about the Macaroni Club, and made up “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as a form of ridicule. It evidently didn’t work very well, although who knows — maybe it helped popularize pasta in the US!
