Posted on 04/23/2023 6:27:39 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Sunday gravy may be the most indelible image of Italian-American culture. Sunday gravy – also called Sunday sauce — is a meat and tomato sauce served over pasta and a staple of home cooking in American cities with a large Italian immigrant population. A vat of sauce overflowing with sausage, meatballs, ribs, or whatever else your family told you was essential to making it, it's not a subtle dish. Instead, it's a weekly celebration, an embrace of bounty, and a tribute to the joy of food in one pot. Sunday gravy is also a classic family dish, not only because it's usually eaten as a big family meal but because distinct recipes are passed down through generations.
Like any immigrant cuisine, Italian-American cooking is a mix of original recipes adapted to the tastes and ingredients of their new home. Dishes like chicken parmesan and marsala are both based on ingredients or preexisting dishes in Italy but became American with the addition of chicken, which was cheaper and more plentiful in the United States than it was in the old country. Sunday gravy, on the other hand, is actually one of the most straightforward culinary transfers from Italy to the U.S. Perhaps owing to its inherent variability, very little changed from the dish Sunday gravy is based on when it crossed the Atlantic. It came from the city of Naples and the region of Campania, and it is as beloved there as Sunday gravy is over here.
Sunday gravy is the Italian-American version of Neapolitan ragù
Italian ragùs are a whole world unto themselves, as they include basically any meat-based pasta sauce, but two classics have come to define the genre. One is the familiar Bolognese, the famous Northern Italian sauce of chopped meat, which traditionally includes few or no tomatoes. The other is less well known in the U.S. by its original name, Neapolitan ragù, but it is the tomato-sauce ragù that became Sunday gravy. Beyond tomatoes, the defining difference between the regions' ragùs is how the meat is treated. In the Neapolitan version, the meat is cooked whole in the sauce, as opposed to the minced or ground meat in Bolognese. Neapolitan ragù also usually includes multiple different cuts of meat, from beef short ribs to pork chops, that will vary by region and chef.
While both Bolognese and Neapolitan sauces made their way to America, the Southern version came to define Italian-American dinners for the simple reason that most immigrants came from Southern Italy. Its long simmering time lent itself to weekend cooking, and by the mid-20th century, it had adopted its Americanized nomenclature of "gravy," becoming the tradition that many Italian families love to this day. In the process, there were only a few small changes, spaghetti became the favored pasta, the meat was served in the sauce instead of on the side, and meatballs were more common. Beyond that, Sunday gravy is a Neapolitan ragù in every way but name.
It’s dinner time and that just makes me hungrier
Rice and gravy, biscuits and gravy with chicken livers, red eye gravy with biscuits, giblets gravy. I could do this all day....
2,2 and 2. ...
2 teaspoons of bacon grease. 2 tablespoons of flour. 2 cups of milk. Gravy.
My Pleasant Grove granny taught me this.
I was a summer Grove rat. (SE Dallas county)
All the gravies I know of are either beige or some shade of brown. Apparently, Italian Gravy is red and something most of us would simply call Pasta Sauce or Spaghetti Sauce.
Lesson learnt.
What are you having?
Sunday gravy is a tomato-based sauce with meats, called that because grandma would make it Sunday afternoon.
Red eye is coffee gravy. Coffee instead of milk. Chicory is best.
This easter I didn’t give my grandkids candy for Easter. I gave them a big pot of meatballs and Bolognese sauce. I had made 4 dozen meatballs and 2 pots of sauce and they were gone in 3 days.
I grew up in an Italian immigrant family.
It was an awesome, awesome experience.
In my home, English and the Italian Avellinese and Sicilian dialects were spoken.
The food, the food. Kids at school wanted to buy my lunches. Meatball and bracciole sandwiches on Scala bread. Eggs fried with peppers and onion.
We had Sunday gravy, Wednesday gravy,Thursday gravy. Friday, we had fishballs, lobster or squid in gravy, or broiled fish. My grandfather and his brothers were fishermen.
Saturday night, it was broiled steak.
There was home made pizza, bread, and for holidays, home made ravioli, fettuccine, and Cavatelli.
It was the best.
I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
My father’s father immigrated from Italy when a young man. They are spaghetti with spaghetti sauce and meatballs to us. Pasta wasn’t even a word I heard growing up. I never heard it called gravy inside our family and only found out a decade or so ago that some people in New England call it gravy. To me, gravy will always be flour and meat drippings.
Okay, just learned that calling it gravy is not an Italian tradition, it’s an Italian-American tradition for some. Italians came over and were trying to assimilate quickly and the word gravy involved meat and sauce, so some opted to use gravy thinking it was more American. I know my grandfather told my father something like, you’re in America, you speaka da English. His accent never disappeared, but he spoke English and made sure his pack of children did too.
Fried chicken
Gravy is brown and goes on meat. You put sauce on spaghetti. And I’m Italian.
I remember the Grove well
Gravy and clam chowder do NOT have tomato in them. Tomatoes are anti-American.
Just made up some pasta and sauce for the week’s lunches
Wonderful memories. More often than Sundays, most of our family dinners involved a pot of gravy with meatballs or sausage.
So you didn’t hide the meatballs and make them hunt for them?
So you didn’t hide the meatballs and make them hunt for them?
Peppers-and-egg sandwiches are among my favorites, especially with melted provolone on top with a slice of tomato. I made sure my children grew up eating Italian food, but they did not learn to enjoy the variety that I grew up with. When I was a kid, our family ran a bar & grille that served Italian meals, and people would come from miles around to eat there.
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