Sunday Dinner

     Coming from an Italian family, it is no wonder that my most memorable childhood object is food. On Sundays my father would do the cooking giving my mother a chance to relax from her many duties as stay-at-home mom. It also spared us from another burned meal which my mother seemed to do so often that she actually had us believing burned food was nutritious for us. To this day there is still something endearing to me about the smell of burned edible food. I wonder what they could do with that idea on the food channel?

     Cooking was not my mother’s favorite chore and she openly admitted her distaste for it. My mother literally and figuratively brought her strengths to the table. One of her specialties was finding lost objects. She was such a master of it that I truly believed I was not as competent at finding things as she. So when she announced in her motherly yet accusing voice, “If I come up there and find it”, it was with mixed blessings when she did reveal the hidden object as if a magician performing a magic act!

    Yes, cooking was not my mother’s favorite activity nor was it even recovering lost objects. In addition to cooking and looking, my mother could fix, repair, mend just about anything in our home-washing machines, dryers, vacuum cleaners and toys of all kinds or create anything that wasn’t already in our home. She did carpentry, plumbing, upholstery, sewing, crocheting, and knitting. One afternoon we returned home from school to witness our dining room torn apart-walls knocked down, wires dandling from the ceiling, plaster everywhere. My mother said she wanted to open up the room to get a little more light in but didn’t count on all these wires.  An electrician did need to come in that time, but she completed the room and to this day, the natural light shines in the dining room. We were tolerant of her burning food because we knew her strengths resided outside the kitchen-in every other room of our house.

    So it was on Sundays that my father let my mother take a break from cooking and give us children a break from my mother’s cooking by making one of his favorite Italian recipes: spaghetti, meatballs and bracholes, which is veal wrapped with spices. After mass on Sundays, we would eat breakfast and then my father would begin the preparations for Sunday dinner. Oddly enough, my father did the food shopping in our family so he always stocked up on cans of whole tomatoes, crushed tomatoes and tomato paste including the Italian seasonings of oregano, thyme, rosemary and sage. With the pride of Papa John’s tomato sauce family recipe, my father would mix the sauce, as he called it, in a big aluminum pot on the stove where the tomato sauce would simmer all day long in the familiar seasonings. He mixed the ground beef together with his special seasonings patting them into meatballs as he had seen his Italian mother do from memory. My grandmother came to Philadelphia from Italy in 1917 having never met her husband-to-be, my grandfather, before their marriage. My father then would lightly brown the meatballs in a pan before adding them to the sauce. Next came fixing the bracholes, which was always a treat since veal was so expensive. My grandfather, who also emigrated from Italy, owned a butcher shop in South Philadelphia where my father and his four other siblings grew up. My father would flatten the veal with a meat hammer, sprinkle some more Italian spices on top and roll it up and tie it together with string and place it in the sauce with the meatballs. We would eat the dinner with long loaves of hard, crusty Italian bread. My father had a habit of gutting the doughy insides of the Italian bread and putting the fluffy innards aside.

    I remember my sisters and brothers throughout the day would sneak tastes of the sauce by dipping small pieces of the innards of the bread into the big pot of sauce. We had noticed how our dad would taste the sauce from time to time with these reserved tufts of bread as it cooked, saving the crusty shell to eat with the meal at dinner time. When finally time to eat, my father would look at the pot of sauce and say “hey, what happened to all the sauce” with a smile in his eyes. He knew that we were all stealing dips of bread and sauce before dinner-including my mother!

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Epilogue: My mother was visiting my brother and his family who live in Gallup several years ago. My mother invited me over for lunch. When I arrived, a faint but familiar smell wafted through the house as my mother greeted me apologizing, I burned the cheese sandwiches while I was fixing Alexa’s [her granddaughter’s] toy. A delicious memory as satisfying as spaghetti and meatballs!