The Strange Pasta Pairing That Prince Loved To Eat

Prince was a once-in-a-generation musical talent: a virtuosic guitar player, a canny songwriter, and a supernova pop star with messianic levels of charisma. He was also, lest we forget, a strange, strange man. After all, this was the fellow who changed his name to a symbol and made an album of odd, spidery MIDI music to be played at his own wedding. His idiosyncrasies extended to his taste in food, as well. Case in point: Prince's favorite meal of spaghetti and orange juice. To be clear, he ate the spaghetti with tomato sauce, but paired it with an orange juice to drink.

To be sure, there's nothing wrong with spaghetti. Who among us wouldn't demolish a plate of the stuff if we were in the right mood? But orange juice is, to put it mildly, not our first choice for a drink pairing. Orange juice is, of course, bright, sweet, sour, and utterly overpowering — surely it would run roughshod over anyone's palate if they're trying to savor their spaghetti? 

But Prince wasn't interested in wine pairings or anything else overly fancy for his favorite food. Indeed, Steven Fargnoli, one of the producers of the film "Purple Rain," said that Prince would routinely order the dish when planning the movie. "He's definitely got his own drummer going," Fargnoli said, an exquisite understatement.

Some of Prince's other favorite foods are about what you would expect from a committed vegan. On his rider during one of his tours, he would request hummus, pita chips, and trail mix to snack on backstage. He had a taste for tea, as well, with his rider also including several varieties of spiced teas, often with throat-soothing ingredients like honey and lemon. However, perhaps the most noteworthy part about Prince's diet was the stuff he didn't eat, although one article from Heavy Table said he did.

According to that article, which was published on April Fool's Day in 2011, Prince had an abiding fondness for Dunk-a-roos, and had ten different varieties of them in his refrigerator. His fridge also supposedly contained an enormous jar of kimchi, a gallon of maple syrup, copious amounts of yak milk, and a "cubic foot" of microgreens. After Prince died in 2016, multiple outlets reported on the article as if it were fact because, well, Prince seemed like the kind of guy who really would have a cubic foot of microgreens in his fridge. (He also seemed like the kind of guy who would forbid photographs of his fridge, making the magazine writers provide a pencil drawing — a truly inspired touch.) But no, alas, it was too good to be true — the spaghetti part, though, is all real.