Generations of Americans can sing the jingle: "Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat." Fewer know that the boxed side dish traces back to a cramped San Francisco kitchen and an Armenian grandmother who survived the 1915 genocide.

A Mission District pasta company

According to Wikipedia, Italian immigrant Domenico DeDomenico came to California in 1890 and opened a produce store. In 1912 his wife, Maria Ferrigno, whose family had owned a pasta factory in Italy, persuaded him to start a pasta business in San Francisco's Mission District. Known first as Gragnano Products, it supplied pasta to Italian stores and restaurants. His sons Vince, Tom, Paskey and Anthony worked in the business, and in 1934 Paskey renamed it the Golden Grain Macaroni Company.

The room for rent

The key ingredient came from someone outside the family. In a 2008 Hidden Kitchens story for NPR, the Kitchen Sisters told how Lois DeDomenico, who grew up in Edmonton, Canada, met Tom DeDomenico in San Francisco in 1944. With housing scarce after the war, the young couple rented a room from an older Armenian widow, Pailadzo Captanian. "I was only 18 and I was pregnant," Lois told NPR. Captanian taught her to make yogurt, baklava and Armenian pilaf. "We would bring her Golden Grain vermicelli from the factory," Lois recalled. "She wanted us to break it as small as rice if we could."

NPR reported that during those afternoons, Captanian told Lois about the Armenian genocide: her husband's death, being separated from her two young sons, and her forced trek from Turkey to Syria in 1915. She had written it all down in a 1919 memoir, Mémoires d'une déportée.

"This would be great in a box"

After the couple moved out, Lois kept cooking the pilaf. At one family dinner, NPR reported, Tom's brother Vince looked at his plate and said, "This would be great in a box." Golden Grain's test kitchen spent three or four years adapting the recipe for one-pot cooking. Wikipedia says Vince added a dry chicken soup mix to rice and macaroni, and that the product was introduced in 1958 in the Northwestern United States and went national three years later, sold as "The San Francisco Treat."

Where the brand went

Quaker Oats bought Golden Grain from the DeDomenico family in 1986, and PepsiCo bought Quaker in 2001. When the Golden Grain name was sold to American Italian Pasta Company in 2003, Rice-A-Roni stayed with PepsiCo's Quaker division, according to Wikipedia. Captanian's grandson Ted told NPR that whenever the jingle came on, his father would say, "You know your grandmother gave a rice recipe to the people who started that company."