Chef Boyardee ABC's & 123's

Around 1980, Chef Boyardee introduced ABC's & 123's: alphabet letters and number shapes in tomato sauce, sold with or without mini meatballs. The product invited play by design — trace your initials in the bowl, spell your name before you ate it, fish out your own age. A mid-1980s spinoff, Tic Tac Toe's, pushed the dinner-as-game idea even further. (And if you remember it as "soup": it's canned pasta, like its rival SpaghettiOs, though the sauce-to-shape ratio makes the confusion understandable.)

The brand behind the letters carries a better story than the letters themselves. In 1924, an Italian immigrant named Ettore "Hector" Boiardi opened the restaurant Il Giardino d'Italia in Cleveland. By 1928 he was selling a canned "ready-to-heat spaghetti kit," and to help Americans pronounce his name, he spelled it out phonetically on the label: Boy-Ar-Dee. The real chef on the can wasn't a marketing invention — he was the actual cook, and the phonetic spelling was a practical fix that became one of the most recognizable brand names in the grocery store.

ABC's & 123's live on today as "Mini ABC's & 123's," still promising kids the same small thrill: dinner you're allowed to read first. For everyone who grew up on it, the alphabet can sits in the same memory drawer as spelling tests and after-school cartoons — a food that did double duty as a toy.