Every Sunday morning in Brooklyn, as I grew up, Mom would create her masterpiece of culinary delights. Mom, created the meatball from scratch like Italian American families all over Brooklyn, and that was a Sunday.
Mom would pack us off to church, a Sunday Mass for children, in our Sunday finery, and we would starve to the edge of distraction until after Mass, where as we walked home, we could smell the meatballs and sauce being made. House or apartment building after apartment building let out the aroma of the promise of a spaghetti or macaroni dinner by 1:00 pm! There was no such thing as saying “pasta” when we really meant macaroni.
Then I got married one day, and found that the tradition was slightly altered. Mom wasn’t making the meatballs, TLW (The Little Woman) was! Keeping in step with Mom, TLW made a great sauce and meatballs, and with small modifications life continued the same. Where once they were fried, the meatballs were now baked, and along the way, I lost my bracciola, both the pork and beef kinds. Mom would tie them up, like prisoners, and I would free them for a worse fate than that!
This morning being a Sunday, I find TLW, busily rolling her meatballs, getting ready for the arrival of her best customer when it comes to food, everybody’s best customer, my beautiful daughter Ellen. It seems to me that sauce is the unifier: 'the bring me home dish' of both my and my children’s generation. If they have one thing from my past, it is what I got from my Dad’s past, the wonderful smell and anticipation of Mom’s sauce.
Life is good!
2 comments:
Oh yes Joe, those were days when you came home from church maybe you were allowed to have a meatball before dinner. We couldn't eat before "communion" in those days, so we were starving! How wonderful the memories!!! CCK
That scene from the movie 'Fatso' with Dom Deluise, when they were holding cousin Sal's wake in the house and Dom was in the kitchen easing his grief by dipping the Italian bread in the sauce simmering on the stove, that pretty much sums up how paisans feel about sauce and meatballs. Nice Sunday morning memories.
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