One online source claims there are 350 types of pasta and twice as many names for them.

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Unlike some types of pasta—for example vermicelli, linguini or gnocchi—macaroni isn’t named for what it looks like.

• Vermicelli is unappetizingly named after worms.
• Gnocchi is named after a knot in wood.
• For linguini you need to think of a linguist who can speak many tongues, because linguini is supposed to look like a human tongue.

Like the group word for all of these foods, pasta, macaroni is named for the “paste” it is made out of.  According to Mark Morton’s book Cupboard Love, an older Greek word gave us the word macaroni as well as macaroon.

Macaroons are also made from paste, in this case almond paste.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the Greek root is a little hard to figure out. One possibility is that it means “barley soup”; another that it is a word meaning “blessed” because this was food only eaten on ceremonial occasions such as at a funeral; or even that the food was named after the funeral chant.

In any case macaroni came into English in 1616, first used in a play by William Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Johnson and is thought to have referred to something like gnocchi.

Here Ben Johnson has his character learning to eat all manner of foreign food including anchovies and macaroni.

However, none of this tells us why when Yankee Doodle came to town, riding on a pony, he stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni.

The reason for that strange usage is that in spite of Ben Johnson’s play, English diners were still only discovering the delights of Italian cuisine 170 years later. This was at the time of the American Revolution.

While the Boston Tea Party was being planned on this side of the Atlantic, dinner parties were being held in London by a group of young dudes who were just over-the-top about European foods and fashions.

They formed a club and named it after their favorite food—macaroni—The Macaroni Club was oh so fashionable.

So at the time, to be “macaroni” was to be very, very fashionable. Soldiers fighting on the British side of the American Revolution, were like all soldiers in that they bad-mouthed the enemy.

Britain was sophisticated.

America was rough cut.

In the eyes of the British an American from the back woods was a hick.  They mocked him, he rode a pony, not a horse, his idea of high fashion was to stick a feather in his hat.