What’s your regional pasta dish?

Hi, I'm a food history nerd. American Goulash is also called American Chop Suey based on location. Gulyas is the Hungarian stew that existed for hundreds of years. Hungarian immigrants started seriously coming over in the 1870s and large groups of them ended up in the Midwest. They were a historical immigrant group that landed between the large waves of German and Irish immigrants and Italian immigrants most Americans are taught about, but about a million Hungarians came here during this time period and historians call it the Great Immigration. Hungarians also landed *everywhere* inside the US. West coast, East coast, Midwest, and so on. So there weren't the cultural identity places that Germans or Italian immigrants ended up building. Anyway, Gulyas is a cheap peasant stew from ranchers/herdsmen that came with it and during the Great Depression, it converted and caught on in popularity as a way to feed lots of hungry people for cheap using elbow macaroni, ground beef and tomatoes. However, there are lots of newspaper recipes and sources that go as early as 1910 or so listing the American adaptation in newspapers all over the country. https://passionatefoodie.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-origins-of-american-goulash.html This is far and away the best resource I've found on this subject because I also grew up with American Goulash in Missouri as an easy comfort food and have studied this before. Think of it as a game of culinary telephone. Diaspora evolve cuisine to suit the place they moved to based on what they could get, so it shifts. 1870s to 1920s is about 50 years, so at least 2-3 generations get some version of Gulyas that is adapted to more American influences. In doing so potatoes gave way to pasta, paprika(which wasn't in the original recipe(neither were potatoes) as Paprika is a pepper, which were introduced by the Turkish invasion in the 1600s thanks to the Colombian Exchange) gave way to tomatoes, and so on. You get post ww2 and enough people have read enough different variants coming out of newspapers and cookbooks that it became the ground meat, pasta, onion dish that most of us know and love today.