I thought this article was good food for thought (pun intended). Any
one with similar experiences? recipes?


Grandchild of Italy cracks the spaghetti code
By Kim Severson
Wednesday, February 21, 2007

My Italian is so bad I have a hard time pronouncing gnocchi, but I grew
up hearing enough of it to know when I'm being yelled at. And that's
definitely what was happening at a table in a small roadside restaurant
in Abruzzi.
I had driven through the Italian mountains with an interpreter to find
Ateleta, the village where my grandmother Floriana Ranallo Zappa grew
up. I had come in search of a recipe. Or more precisely, the evolution
of a recipe.
For reasons I couldn't put together until recently, I had been obsessed
with tracking a path that began in my grandmother's village and ended
with the pot of red sauce that simmers on my stove on Sunday afternoons.
I ended up on the red sauce trail largely because I don't have a
hometown. My parents were dutiful players in the great corporate
migrations of the 1960s and '70s. My dad worked for the Uniroyal Tire
Company. His rise through the ranks of midlevel management required a
series of moves, which were always euphemistically presented to the
children as "transfers."
The company sent us from Wisconsin to California to Michigan to Texas
and then back to Michigan, where I finally got off the family train and
went to college.
Through all that moving, the one constant was my mother's spaghetti
sauce. As soon as we got the kitchen shelf paper laid and she figured
out where the grocery store was, she made the sauce. It meant this was
home, and that first plate of spaghetti and meatballs made us all feel
as if everything was going to be O.K.
Now, with several more states' worth of my own transfers behind me, the
first thing I cook in a new kitchen is a big pot of sauce. When my
siblings and I visit each other, spaghetti is on the menu.
I wanted to know where the recipe came from. And in a way, where I came
from. So I became a culinary detective.
But back in the Italian village where it all supposedly began, things
weren't going so great. I was sitting with the closest relative I could
find, Filomena Sciullo Ranallo, my grandmother's sister-in-law. We were
at a table at La Bottega dell'Arte Salata, the small rosticceria my
distant cousins run. They were thrilled each time one of the American
relatives came to visit, explaining with great pride how Madonna had
tried to find her relatives at a nearby village a few years ago and
failed. But not you, they told me. You are luckier than Madonna.
I was trying to write down recipes when the old woman grabbed my arm,
shaking it hard. Why didn't I speak any Italian? And even worse, why did
I think oregano had any place in tomato sauce?
Well, because my mother put oregano in her sauce. But oregano, like the
meatballs I add to the pot, was only one of the twists and turns the
recipe had taken during nearly a century in America.
In fact, it turns out that there is no single iconic red sauce in my
grandmother's village. There are sauces with lamb, an animal the village
organizes an entire festival around. There are sauces with only tomato
and basil, sauces just for the lasagna and sauces just for grilled
meats. Small meatballs might go in a broth, but never in sauce for pasta.
In fact, only two things in the village reminded me of anything I grew
up with. The fat pork sausages were cooked and served the same way, and
my Italian cousins looked just like my brothers.
To understand why I made my sauce the way I did, I needed to start
closer to home, with my mother. She has been making spaghetti sauce for
almost 60 years, from a recipe she learned from her mother, who had been
making it with American ingredients since the early 1900s.
My grandmother had been shipped to America, literally and largely
against her will, to marry an Italian named John Zappa. He ran a dairy
farm in a little town called Cumberland in northwest Wisconsin. She was
still a teenager, illiterate even in Italian. To the day she died,
Grandma Zap spoke only enough English to communicate the most basic
things to her bored American grandchildren, of which I was one.
In between, she raised 11 children. My mother, Anne Marie, was the
second-youngest.
Among my four siblings, how mom makes her sauce has been a constant
source of discussion. We're all decent cooks, but none of us can get it
just right. When does she put in the paste? Is a little bit of roasted
pepper essential? Do you need to use oregano in the meatballs?
This is a problem my cousins have, too. Sharon Herman still lives in
Cumberland, not far from the Zappa family dairy farm. Her mother (my
aunt and godmother, the late Philomena DeGidio) was one of the oldest of
the Zappa girls and was considered the best sauce maker. My cousin has
lived for years under the cloud of never having mastered the master's
sauce.
"I could never figure it out," Cousin Sharon told me. "I even took her
little hand once and made her measure out all the spices like she did
and put them in measuring spoons to try to get the exact amounts. It
still didn't taste right."
The master's secret, perhaps, was that she ran a can of carrots, a
couple of celery stalks and the onion and garlic through a blender and
then put the mixture in the sauce. My mother doesn't do this. The master
also put in the tomato paste at the end. My mother prefers to brown the
meatballs and ribs first and then deglaze the pan with the paste.
Getting a recipe out of my mother is like trying to get a 4-year-old to
explain what happened at day care. She's not one of those annoying and
cagey matrons of the kitchen who build their power by dangling the
promise of a secret ingredient that will never be revealed. She just
cooks by hand, so she's never really able to articulate every step.
She can tell you to make sure the meatballs are well browned. ("Don't
put those white meatballs into that sauce!" she'll warn.) And she can
give you tips on the all-important step called "fixing the sauce" ‹
tasting it toward the end and adding a little red wine vinegar or maybe,
in a pinch, a handful of Parmesan cheese to smooth out the flavor.
But an exact recipe? Not so much. For example, thin-skinned Italian
peppers were always around the farmhouse she grew up in, so she likes to
use some kind of pepper to give the sauce what she calls "homemade
flavor." She often just uses pickled peperoncini from a jar, which I do,
too. Once, when I was out of them, I called to see if she had a
substitute. She suggested green bell peppers.
"But I never put in green peppers," I told her.
"Well, if you had one you would," she said. "But don't go out of your
way. It doesn't make that much difference."
O.K., Mom. Let's focus.
"When do you put the chicken thighs in?" I asked another time.
"Oh, honey, I never use chicken thighs."
"But last time I was home, the sauce had chicken thighs."
"Huh ‹ that's funny," she said. "I guess I must have had some in the
freezer."
These are maddening conversations, but I think they will go on until the
day she makes her last pot.
If anything, her sauce, like her mother's sauce, and the sauces from the
home village of Ateleta, are about making do. Well-browned meat is the
key, but you use the meat you have.
Once my grandmother made it to America, there was plenty of meat around.
So her sauce became an American version of three-meat rag, a dish not
uncommon in parts of Abruzzi. They would butcher their own hogs and
fatten up a few of the dairy cows, so the sauce often simmered with a
piece of neck bone or tail or even a steak from a shoulder blade.
My mother, who lived through elementary school without a refrigerator,
was often dispatched to the cellar to scrape two inches of sealing
grease off the top of a crock and return to the kitchen with preserved
sausages and pork ribs for the sauce.
Mom happily left the farm and married Jim Severson, whose roots are in
Norway. My father will never turn down a piece of lefse, the flat bread
of his people, but he can still catalog the distinct tastes of almost
every Zappa sister's sauce.
As he moved my mom around the country, she fell in love with convenience
foods and the big, clean supermarkets of the suburbs. She no longer had
to can tomatoes or dry basil and parsley on cookie sheets. And all the
meat came on those nice, clean plastic trays.
Mom even took to using something food manufacturers call "Italian
seasoning." But she'll also use a mix of about three parts dried basil
to one part dried oregano. My grandmother never used oregano; just lots
of parsley and basil. But all the Zappa daughters did.
I was stumped about why the family sauce ended up heavy with oregano and
meat. So I called Lidia Bastianich, the New York chef who has written
much about the transfer of Italian food to America.
"This is a cuisine of adaptation, of nostalgia, of comfort," she said.
By overemphasizing some of the seasonings Italian immigrants brought
from home, they could more easily conjure it up. And sometimes the
adaptations were simply practical. Using tomato paste, for example, was
a way to make the watery tomatoes in the United States taste more like
the thick-fleshed kind that grew in Italy.
My family's serving style is to pile the pork and beef and meatballs
onto a big platter of spaghetti, sometimes with sausage. That mountain
of meat might be a homage to my grandmother, who found such abundance
when she arrived. Or maybe she was just overwhelmed: on a farm with no
refrigerator, not a lot of money and 11 children, she didn't have time
for a separate meat and pasta course.
As hard as my mother tried to get off the farm, I am trying just as hard
to get back. Like her, I use spareribs and a nice, fatty piece of beef.
I try to buy them from local farmers who raise their animals outdoors on
pasture and sell them for prices that make my mother shake her head. I
would give anything to have a crock of sausage under a layer of pork fat
in the cellar.
I use fresh basil and fresh bread crumbs instead of Progresso in my
meatballs, but I still stick to dried basil and oregano in the sauce. My
canned tomatoes come from Italy, even though my mother thinks Contadina
or Hunt's is just fine.
It never tastes just like hers, but I keep trying. And maybe that's the
problem. Perhaps I'm too fixated on my fancy-pants ingredients. Or
perhaps it's just a psychological quirk of the kitchen. The one that
makes you think nothing ever tastes as good as your mother's.
Around Thanksgiving, my parents moved into a small condominium and were
going to sell the family dining table. Instead, I arranged to have it
shipped from Colorado, where they live now. It's a little too big for my
Brooklyn brownstone, and it's not an antique or even an heirloom. My
mother bought it during one of our many transfers simply because she
needed a bigger table.
But it is the table I grew up with. I have eaten hundreds of plates of
spaghetti on it. I feel the need to keep it, to pass it on to one of my
nieces or nephews. I want to say, "This was your grandmother's table."
And then I will make them sit down and eat spaghetti, and tell them the
story of the red sauce trail.

Notes:


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Copyright 2007 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

In article >,
Donald Martinich > wrote:

> I thought this article was good food for thought (pun intended). Any
> one with similar experiences? recipes?

Oh, Ida Know, Don. The spareribs and not-ground-beef other meat
reminded me of Bette Mezzenga's spaghetti sauce recipe I posted in
another thread earlier in the week..

And for some reason the piece made me think about more than one, uh,
discussion * yeah, that's the ticket * discussion * I've had with one
sister about how Mom did or did not make something. While my sister
concluded that I was nuts and a liar besides, I concluded that Mother
did, in fact, change the way she made some things. Not an unimaginable
thought since she cooked "by hand" most of the time, too.

Thanks for a lovely post.

--
-Barb, Mother Superior, HOSSSPoJ
http://web.mac.com/barbschaller - Winter pic and a snow pic
http://jamlady.eboard.com
http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/amytaylor

Melba's Jammin' wrote:

>
> And for some reason the piece made me think about more than one, uh,
> discussion * yeah, that's the ticket * discussion * I've had with one
> sister about how Mom did or did not make something. While my sister
> concluded that I was nuts and a liar besides, I concluded that Mother
> did, in fact, change the way she made some things. Not an unimaginable
> thought since she cooked "by hand" most of the time, too.
>

By the time you came along, wasn't she also cooking for a lot fewer
people than when your older sisters were at home? That makes a big
difference, too.























gloria p

In article >,
Puester > wrote:

> Melba's Jammin' wrote:
>
> >
> > And for some reason the piece made me think about more than one, uh,
> > discussion * yeah, that's the ticket * discussion * I've had with one
> > sister about how Mom did or did not make something. While my sister
> > concluded that I was nuts and a liar besides, I concluded that Mother
> > did, in fact, change the way she made some things. Not an unimaginable
> > thought since she cooked "by hand" most of the time, too.
> >
>
> By the time you came along, wasn't she also cooking for a lot fewer
> people than when your older sisters were at home? That makes a big
> difference, too.

> gloria p

She cooked for a minimum of six people for a very long time -- and
mostly more than six. In a relatively short time period, the number
dropped from six or eight to three. THAT was tough for her. Didn't
know how to cook anything but a big mess of potatoes. :-)
--
-Barb, Mother Superior, HOSSSPoJ
http://web.mac.com/barbschaller - Winter pic and a snow pic
http://jamlady.eboard.com
http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/amytaylor

"Melba's Jammin'" > wrote in message
...
> In article >,
> Puester > wrote:
>
>> Melba's Jammin' wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > And for some reason the piece made me think about more than one, uh,
>> > discussion * yeah, that's the ticket * discussion * I've had with one
>> > sister about how Mom did or did not make something. While my sister
>> > concluded that I was nuts and a liar besides, I concluded that Mother
>> > did, in fact, change the way she made some things. Not an unimaginable
>> > thought since she cooked "by hand" most of the time, too.
>> >
>>
>> By the time you came along, wasn't she also cooking for a lot fewer
>> people than when your older sisters were at home? That makes a big
>> difference, too.
>
>> gloria p
>
> She cooked for a minimum of six people for a very long time -- and
> mostly more than six. In a relatively short time period, the number
> dropped from six or eight to three. THAT was tough for her. Didn't
> know how to cook anything but a big mess of potatoes. :-)
> --
> -Barb, Mother Superior, HOSSSPoJ
> http://web.mac.com/barbschaller - Winter pic and a snow pic
> http://jamlady.eboard.com
> http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/amytaylor



I just read an article that said that Southern cooks are genetically
predisposed to cook for 20+ and no less.....I promptly took the magazine and
conked His Majesty with it and said see....I am not intentionally trying to
fatten you up (he did that on his own.....no one said he had to lick the
platter clean).
-ginny