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  • 2012-11-06 (xsd:date)
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  • Is Ravioli a Traditional Veterans Day Meal? (en)
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  • Veterans Day (known prior to 1954 as Armistice Day) is a U.S. holiday that celebrates the service of all U.S. military veterans and is observed on November 11 to coincide with the date of the signing of the 1918 armistice that brought an end to hostilities in World War I. Although annual presidential proclamations calling for the observance of Armistice Day on November 11 were not issued until 1926, and Armistice Day was not designated as a U.S. federal holiday until 1938, Armistice Day was first celebrated in 1919: Each year on Veterans Day a national ceremony is held at Arlington National Cemetery (usually attended by the President of the United States or, in his absence, another high government official) which includes a wreath laying at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Local observances typically include speeches from dignitaries, parades, moments of silence, and prayer ceremonies. Ravioli is a traditional Italian food consisting of a filling enclosed within two layers of thin egg pasta dough, served in broth or with a pasta sauce. The type of ravioli most familiar to Americans is a canned version filled with beef or processed cheese and served in a tomato-based sauce. Save for the fact that tinned ravioli was developed around the time of World War I, there is no connection between that food and Veterans Day, as asserted in a now common rumor: The rumor that ravioli is a traditional meal on Veterans Day, a tradition initiated when President Woodrow Wilson supposedly served a ravioli dinner to 2,000 veterans who visited the White House on 11 November 1919, originated with a spurious edit made to Wikipedia's article about Veterans Day on 11 November 2010, which added the following paragraph: None of the sources cited in that paragraph supported the historical notion of ravioli as a traditional Veterans Day meal, though. The first footnote simply referenced a 2009 article from the Lebanon, Ohio, Western Star newspaper that coincidentally mentioned ravioli was being served as part of the lunch menu at a local school on Veterans Day. The other footnote cited a page in The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink that provided a source for Woodrow Wilson's Armistice Day statement about hunger breeding madness rather than reform, and that mentioned how the rise in commercial canning after World War I had popularized Americanized versions of ethnic dishes such as ravioli — but it offered no connection between those two topics. (President Wilson hosted no dinners for anyone at the White House in November 1919, as he had suffered a debilitating stroke the previous month and remained in seclusion.) The false information about a Veterans Day-ravioli connection persisted on Wikipedia for exactly a year, until it was finally removed via another edit on Veterans Day 2011. During that time, however, the apocryphal tale of President Wilson's purportedly initiating the tradition by serving a ravioli dinner to a group of veterans at the White House in 1919 was uncritically picked up and cited as fact by a number of other sources, such as a 2011 Examiner.com article: It may be the case that many Americans eat ravioli on Veterans Day, but only because many Americans eat ravioli on every other day of the year as well, not because President Wilson once served it to some White House visitors. (en)
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