Naporitan


Naporitan or Napolitan is a popular Japanese pasta dish. The dish consists of spaghetti, tomato ketchup or a tomato-based sauce, onion, button mushrooms, green peppers, sausage, bacon and Tabasco sauce. Naporitan is claimed to be from Yokohama. An instant Naporitan is also available in Japan today.

Origin

It was created by Shigetada Irie, the general chef of the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama, when he was inspired by one of the military rations of GHQ, which was spaghetti mixed with tomato ketchup.

Name

The chef named the dish after Naples, Italy. Phonetically, the Japanese language doesn't distinguish R and L as separate sounds, and so uses the same katakana characters to represent R and L sounds of Western alphabets. Thus when converting katakana back into English, based solely on the Japanese writing the spelling in the English alphabet is ambiguous and can vary. The spelling Naporitan is derived from the usual romanization of Japanese, while the spelling Napolitan takes the origin of the name into account.