There’s one dish mom used to make that my brothers and sisters still speak of in hushed, reverential tones: Sunday gravy.
Actually, we never called it gravy. Around our house it was either spaghetti and meatballs, or “all-day spaghetti.” Gravy or not, it was a dish always served on Sundays, as that was the only day of the week mom had time to start cooking in the morning, and fuss with a simmering pot until dinner time.
I now often refer to it as “Godfather spaghetti” as a tribute to my favorite movie. In “The Godfather,” as the family prepares for war with rival mobsters, Clemenza takes Michael Corleone aside in the home kitchen crowded with soldiers preparing for battle. Clemenza tells Michael, “You never know, you might have to cook for 20 guys someday,” and starts dumping ingredients into a pot. Tomato sauce, wine, meatballs, sausage. I remember thinking, “The Mob really is bad, they stole mom’s recipe.”
Of course spaghetti and meatballs isn’t a true Italian dish. It’s Italian-American, fusing the tomato and pasta dishes of the Old World with the abundance of the American grocery. Early Italian immigrants, such as my family or the fictional Corleones, took the food of southern Italy, a vegetable-based cuisine of poverty, and jazzed it up with meat in quantities never affordable back home. If mom had tried cooking up the authentic cuisine of our ancestors from Sicily we would have recognized the noodles, but the sardines, fennel, capers and wild greens would not have gone over well. The Breeding kids didn’t like their vegetables.
One family meal that will live in infamy featured my brother Scott lingering for an hour over an uneaten side of Brussels sprouts. Mom finally laid down the law, giving him 30 seconds to clean his plate or be grounded. Scott inhaled the sprouts in the allotted time, then, like an alpha wolf returning to his pups, he regurgitated the vegetables, still recognizable after a brief interlude in his stomach, right there on his dinner plate.
If I recall correctly, he was sent to his room for the night but avoided grounding.
While not exactly Italian, Sunday gravy does have its roots in Italy where there is a tradition of braising meats in tomato sauce. As it cooks the meat juices marry with the tomatoes, creating a sauce that seems divinely inspired. It’s so good that I’m convinced whenever Italy beats the Brits or French in the World Cup it’s just God’s way of saying thanks for the superior cuisine. Italians use some of the sauce to dress their pasta. And by dressed I mean they add just enough to lightly coat the noodle, similar to the way you dress a salad. The meat, sometimes ribs or braciole, is reserved for a second course.
In the states we do it differently. The noodles hit the plate first, followed by generous ladles of sauce, then a meatball or two or maybe a link of sausage, topped with a dusting of Parmesan. When the spaghetti and meat are gone, the extra sauce is mopped up with fresh bread – a semolina loaf from Ceres is perfect.
It isn’t authentic Italian, but it is authentic Italian-American. More importantly, it’s damn good.
Google “Sunday gravy” and you’ll find countless versions. Here’s my family recipe:
Meatballs
2 pounds ground beef
1 cup Parmesan cheese
2 cups bread crumbs
2 eggs
2 cloves of garlic, minced
2 teaspoons salt
Fresh ground pepper to taste
Mix and form into meatballs a little bigger than golf balls but smaller than tennis balls.
Add a couple tablespoons of olive oil to a stock pot and a few cloves of garlic. Brown the meatballs and four links of Italian sausage – two sweet, two hot – in the oil and reserve.
Sauce
Add three 12 ounce cans of tomato paste to the pot and lightly fry until the paste has rusted a bit.
Add a 29-ounce can of tomato puree, and two 29-ounce cans of water to the pot.
Season with a teaspoon or two of dried oregano, add sugar, salt and pepper to taste.
I like to add a little red wine, but the amount varies depending on how early in the process I’ve opened the bottle. A half cup is a good start, but it never seems to be enough.
Return the sausage and meatballs to the pot and let it simmer until you can’t resist any longer, cook up some spaghetti, over sauce it like a red-blooded American, and enjoy.