Many people in the U.S. know about the life of Pailadzo Captanian. She survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915, suffered during exile, found herself in the United States of America, reunited with her family and became the creator of the most famous dish in the United States of America, that is, “Rice with Vermicelli”.

Little is known about the life of Pailadzo Captanian before 1915. She was born in 1882 and received a brilliant European education. After her husband passed away during the Armenian Genocide, she delivered her three children to a Greek family escaping from the Ottoman Empire, while she found herself in a Syrian desert along with thousands of Armenians.

Pailadzo became one of the few people who managed to reach Aleppo from where she emigrated to the United States of America in search of her children.

The whole story of Pailadzo took place in the tragic period for the Armenian people and is described in the French-language book “Memories of an Deportee” (Mémoires D’une Déportée, 1919), which served as a basis for the research conducted by American lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who is of Jewish descent, coined the term “genocide” and authored the UN Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

In the 1920s, Pailadzo found her children and settled in New York where she started working as a tailor in the mansion of the 32^nd President of the United States of America Franklin Roosevelt.

In the 1940s, Captanian’s family moved to San Francisco, California where Pailadzo met the sons of a well-known Italian-American entrepreneur by the name of DeDomenico, who was the owner of Golden Grain Macaroni.

Pailadzo, who was 70 at the time, not only taught the Italian family how to prepare various Armenian national dishes, but also shared her “Armenian Rice with Vermicelli” recipe, which became the most well-known trademark in the market of semi-finished products in the United States under the name “Rice-A-Roni”.

Captanian died in 1968. Today, her diary about the road of exile has been translated into several languages, and the recipe for Armenian rice has been considered the most in-demand in the United States for the past 60 years.