There was a time not so long ago when your local pizza delivery person wasn’t just slinging cardboard boxes filled with cheesy pies but also vast vats of vermicelli. Yes, the legends are true; not only were folks in the ’90s ordering spaghetti delivered straight to their doorstep, but in a move that had Nonna rolling over in her grave, Little Caesars delivered these massive portions of sauced pasta in huge plastic buckets.
The “Spaghetti! Spaghetti!” menu item, as it was called, first hit the market in 1993. It was originally just a side-dish deal that came along with a pair of pizzas — for when you really needed to carbo-load. Quickly, however, the saucy pasta caught on. Just a few months after its introduction, the spaghetti had moved from side to main, with Little Caesars offering three sizes of pasta buckets: small, medium, and “Big! Big!” It’s a little hard to imagine anyone turning down the “Big! Big!” option, which included not only three-and-a-half pounds of saucy noodles but also eight pieces of “Crazy Bread” — which is what the brand calls its breadsticks.
It was truly a golden age of pizza chain innovation. For less than $10, one could order delivered to their home a truly mammoth portion of spaghetti drowning in plain marinara or an unspecified meat sauce. While Little Caesars has not ceased to innovate since the discontinuation of its spaghetti buckets in 1998 — notably bringing to market such crazy items as a french fry crust pizza and the pocket-sized Crazy Puffs Pizzas, which are basically pizza cupcakes — nothing has achieved quite the same absurdity as that hefty bucket of noodles.
How can you experience the joy of Little Caesars’ spaghetti buckets?
Unfortunately, it has been more than a quarter of a century now since the pasta bucket dropped from the Little Caesars menu. Of course, there is precedent for fan favorite items to return, such as the Little Caesars Pretzel Crust Pizza, but things don’t look great for “Spaghetti! Spaghetti!” You can find plenty of folks on the internet waxing poetic about the long-lost pasta pail of times past, but unfortunately petitions for the menu item’s return have sadly underperformed, garnering just over 300 signatures between several. Numbers like that are certainly not going to sway the corporate pizza overlords. Alas, if the nostalgia is killing you after reading this article, or you are simply desperate to know how Americans once lived, you’re going to have to make that tub of noodles yourself.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to whip up a makeshift version of the “Big! Big! Spaghetti! Spaghetti!” bucket at home. You can just make yourself this easy baked spaghetti recipe and dump it into a plastic beach pail, or try eating this Instant Pot spaghetti recipe straight out of the appliance. The metal bucket of the Instant Pot might not quite match the vibe, but it will save you on dishes later. As for the Crazy Bread, well, you may just have to order that out for the full experience. But if you want to keep this all in-house, you can also pretty easily make breadsticks from store-bought pizza dough. Then, simply pop in a VHS of “Jurassic Park,” close your eyes, and you can almost imagine for a second that you are back in those simpler times.
