MY Italian is so
bad I have a hard time pronouncing gnocchi, but I grew up hearing enough of it
to know when Im being yelled at. And thats
definitely what was happening at a table in a small roadside restaurant in
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 couldnt put together until recently, I had been
obsessed with tracking a path that began in my grandmothers 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 dont 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
Through all that
moving, the one constant was my mothers 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 werent going so great. I was sitting with the
closest relative I could find, Filomena Sciullo Ranallo, my grandmothers sister-in-law. We were at a
table at La Bottega dellArte 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 didnt 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
In fact, it turns
out that there is no single iconic red sauce in my grandmothers 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
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.
Were 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
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 didnt
taste right.
The masters
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 doesnt 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. Shes 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 shes never really able to articulate every step.
She can tell you
to make sure the meatballs are well browned. (Dont
put those white meatballs into that sauce! shell
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 dont go
out of your way. It doesnt make that much
difference.
O.K.,
Mom.
Lets 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 thats 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 mothers sauce, and the sauces from the home
Once my
grandmother made it to
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
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
shell 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
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
My familys
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 didnt 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
It never tastes
just like hers, but I keep trying. And maybe thats the
problem. Perhaps Im too fixated on my fancy-pants ingredients. Or perhaps its just a psychological quirk of the kitchen.
The one that makes you think nothing ever tastes as good as your mothers.
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
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 grandmothers
table.
And then I will
make them sit down and eat spaghetti, and tell them the story of the red sauce
trail.