Making Gravy

I didn’t feel like our home in Joburg would really be “home” until I made “gravy” in the kitchen. Gravy is Italian tomato sauce to the uninitiated, specifically Italian tomato sauce made in the New York metropolitan area.

Having grown up in NJ with an Italian mother (Marie Tassely) and my husband having grown up with a Sicilian one (Concetta Pitruzzello from The Bronx), nothing says home cooking like macaroni and meatballs and gravy.

my  mother with her aunts in Milan, Italy

I remember this was tough after we first moved to Florida in 1971. The world market had not become so flat back then and real Italian ingredients were very difficult to come by below the Mason Dixon line. Every time someone would drive down to Florida to visit us from NJ, my mother would dictate that they pack a Care Package cooler with Polly-O ricotta and fresh mozzarella, among other things. Now, you can even get fresh imported burrata in NJ which was once the sole property of Puglia in Italy. (I never could find real rascasse however outside of Provence so the world is still not flat enough for a truly homemade Marseille bouillabaisse, but it is only a matter of time.)

So I went to the Pick n Pay and the Woolies (Woolworths), the local supermarkets, to buy the ingredients. There were small cans of Italian tomatoes and plain tomato purees, tubes of tomato paste, minced beef but not the meatloaf mix I like to use. Italian sausage? Fuhgetaboutit!
Instead we bought some minced pork and fennel and tried to fashion our own. It was tasty but not nearly fatty enough.  (I have since found an Italian gourmet shop at the Bryanston Organic Market that regularly carries a good sweet Italian sausage as well as fresh ricotta and mozzarella. I have to special order my hot sausage though.)

Olive oil, onion, garlic, basil, oregano, parsley, bay leaf, Parmesan cheese, red wine, check! The macaroni variety was somewhat limited at the supermarket but there was spaghetti. (Bryanston Organic Market also has a large variety of fresh pasta and homemade raviolis.)

“It was not my best,” as my mother always said in mock humility to the accolades, but it was "home".