(If you haven’t seen Elf, just walk outside and you’ll likely bump into an anniversary screening of it.)
Many of us have watched this scene every year for two decades and the maple syrup spaghetti still elicits the same reactions — mainly laughing at the ridiculous pairing or cringing at the waste of a perfectly good plate of spaghetti. It’s easily one of the movie’s most notorious scenes.
Since then, maple syrup has been incorporated into several tie-in products, including flavored Goldfish and tiny syrup bottles packaged in advent calendars. HelloFresh even released an Elf spaghetti kit this year, which has already sold out. The recipe calls for spaghetti noodles topped with maple syrup and all kinds of chocolate and candy, but no tomato sauce like in the movie. Cowards.
If you’re like us, the dish as it was portrayed onscreen may pique a sort of morbid curiosity. Is Buddy the Elf onto something with his notion that syrup goes with everything? Is there something we can learn from this flavor palate that was conceived of as a joke?
You already know where we’re going with this: We put maple syrup on spaghetti.
Luckily, we had some leftover spaghetti and marinara sauce on hand that provided a base much like the meal Buddy defiles in the movie. We’re pretty committed to this bit, but not enough to buy a bunch of ingredients and cook (and potentially waste) a whole meal for it.
After a quick zap in the microwave and a hearty helping of maple syrup, we had a meal that was identical to the one in the movie (for better or for worse) and fit for an elf.The final verdict? It’s fine!
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The final verdict? It’s fine!
We mean it. The combination of spaghetti and maple syrup isn’t half bad. We can kind of see where Buddy the Elf was coming from. Our slapdash version wasn’t much to write home about, but the flavors were compatible enough that we can imagine some restaurant serving a “maple-infused” pasta sauce with a straight face and no mention of Elf.
(It is worth mentioning that maple syrup is a fairly common ingredient in homemade marinara sauce, particularly as an alternative sweetener in vegan recipes. We Googled and looked through a few of those recipes and they sound tasty for humans, but definitely not up to an elf’s standards for sweetness.)
Do we recommend making this meal at home and eating it unironically like you would a regular plate of spaghetti? Maybe, depending on what kind of person you are ... or how stoned. But if you’re like us and just looking to do it as a gag, we can at least guarantee it won’t gross you out too much.
Full disclosure, though: We did not pile a bunch of candy onto our spaghetti like Buddy did in a different scene. If you’re thinking of trying that, you’re on your own.
