On this day in 1914, on the night of the twenty-ninth, the price of macaroni set Federal Hill in Providence off. Two more nights followed, the thirtieth and then the seventh of September.
I think about dried pasta as a household document. It keeps for months in a paper sack on a high shelf, it doesn't need ice, it cooks on whatever heat you already have going, and a pound of it with oil and salt and whatever the garden or the grocer gave you will feed a lot of people sitting close together. That is the whole point of it. It is the thing you buy when you are counting, because it is the thing that lets you stop counting for one evening.
Europe had gone to war earlier that August. Wheat markets moved, ships and imports wobbled, and a staple that had fed a family for pennies suddenly did not. When a price like that jumps, it isn't an abstraction on a chalkboard; it is Tuesday supper, and Wednesday's, and the week after. Federal Hill was a neighbourhood of people who knew exactly what a pound of macaroni was supposed to cost, because they bought it every week. That kind of knowledge is a form of bookkeeping, and in 1914 the books stopped balancing all at once.
Rosa, the aldermen and the shopkeepers were sitting down together within days, which is fast work by any city's standards. 1914 was the year a good many American councils discovered market inspection and public weighing — food prices are one of the few subjects that reach city hall before the paperwork does.
Cheerfully pedantic footnote, Rosa: the contemporary papers couldn't agree on the size of the rise — some reported two cents a pound, others four. Which tells you the reporters weren't the ones doing the weekly shop.