Weekly Italian Food Menu

I have to admit I was pretty stumped on what to write about this week.  So I decided since I’m always recording videos of food, why not write about it.  As soon as I started, everything came flooding back to me.

When I was growing up you could pretty much tell what day of the week it was by what was being served for dinner. Don’t know if this holds true for Italians in Italy, but for Italian-Americans where I was raised this is a true story.

On Sunday, we had macaroni with meat from the gravy, including meatballs. Yes, I said gravy because that’s what we called it. You can call it sauce, sugo, ragu…whatever you like, but we called it gravy. This blog is not for debating what it is called.   Also it wasn’t pasta…it was macaroni.  If you look at a box of Ronzoni, it will clearly state on the box “Enriched Macaroni Product.”  I guess that’s where we got that translation from.  Don’t know how calling it gravy came about, but one guy on an Italian-American Facebook page had a very logical explanation. When our grandparents came over from Italy, they didn’t know how to translate the word “sauce” into an American word.  Since meat had gravy on it in this country, they adopted the translation as “gravy.”  Makes sense to me.  I remember my grandma Nanine cutting out the coupons on the side of the Ronzoni boxes. If my memory serves me well, I think they were turned in for dishes, glasses or something like that when you reached a certain amount.  We had plenty of empty Ronzoni boxes because we had all sorts of macaroni at least three times a week.

Sundays were usually at my grandparents house with the entire family.  They had 14 children so you can imagine how many people were at the dinner table. The table would extend from the dining area into the living room. If there were too many people, we ate in shifts.  The men ate first of course, then the women and  children.   Although this photo on the right isn’t of my family, it looks a lot like Sunday dinner at grandma and grandpa’s when I was a kid.  But it wasn’t only gravy and macaroni, we had second and third dishes. Roast chicken with potatoes, sides of vegetables, after which we had coffee, either Amed’ican or demitasse with Anisette and pastries from one of the local bakeries. My grandma and aunts weren’t bakers.  I’m the baker in the family and I don’t know where I get it from to be honest.  Sundays were a tradition with my aunts and grandmother  in the kitchen cooking. My mother was the oldest so she didn’t usually cook; can’t explain why. All of her younger sisters did the cooking with grandma.  Dinner started around 2:30/3:00 and lasted until 7:00/8:00. Everyone too stuffed to move.  We don’t eat like that on Sundays anymore.  Too much food; although we have lots of food on the holidays, but that’s a different blog.

On Monday it was soup day, whether it be chicken, beef, or any other kind of soup.  Soup on Monday was supposed to cleanse your stomach from all the eating you did on the weekend.  I don’t see how as there was tons of meat, vegetables and small pasta such as acini de pepe, tubettini, orzo or similar pasta in the soup. Tuesday it was some sort of pasta dish, like pasta pizelle (with peas), pasta lenticchie (with lentils), pasta e fagioli (fazool with beans), pasta e patate (potatoes, which my grandfather loved since it was mainly Sicilian) see photo on left, all of which are peasant foods, easy to make and oh sooooo delicious!  Followed by some sort of meat dish and salad. I like to refer to these dishes as Italian Soul Food.  In these dishes we used the smaller pasta, but not as small as soup pasta. It would be Ditali, Elbows, Small Shells or any other small pasta.  Wednesday, it was potluck, whatever Mom felt like making. It could be anything from sausage and peppers/onion, Italian vegetable stew “Ciambotta, ” chicken cacciatore, pork chops, or cutlets. Of course, there was a first dish and salad. We had to have a “first dish”  with everything we ate.  I remember my cousin Ann Milano, who didn’t go to work when she lived at home.  My aunt and uncle were separated, so Ann lived with her father, (my Uncle Pete).  He went to work every day in the construction field and she stood at home doing the cooking and cleaning.  She told me that she had made a beautiful dinner with meat, potatoes, vegetables and salad, but when my Uncle Pete sat down to dinner he asked her “where’s the first dish?”  She said she didn’t think she needed it because there was enough to eat for dinner.  He wouldn’t eat dinner until she made a first dish.  So she whipped up a quick potato soup.  Uncle Pete was happy!

On Thursday it was gravy again with macaroni and always, always a big salad with all our meals.  On Friday of course, it was fish day.  In those days Catholics weren’t allowed to eat meat on Fridays.  We usually had a first dish of some sort of pasta such as Linguine with Clam Sauce, pasta pizelle, pasta e fagioli, and then either filet of sole, shrimp or some other type of fish dish; mostly fried.  My grandfather after all was a fisherman from Sicily and owned a fish market on First Avenue, 113th Street, Tocco’s Fish Market.  There was also another fish market near 116th Street and First Avenue owned by his cousin called “Tocco’s Fish Market.”  They would refer to all my uncles as the “Fishes…” Mikey Fish, Petey Fish, Sally Fish, Jerry Fish…you get the idea.

On Saturday it was either steak or fried veal cutlets; one of the higher priced meats.  For some reason we didn’t have chicken cutlets back then. Maybe because my mother and father were butchers, but I don’t think many of us had chicken cutlets. I think that came about in the 70’s.  The meat was served with potatoes, vegetables and of course, salad.  We never ate our salad at the beginning of the meal.  We either ate it alongside our meat or afterwards.  I still make salad with most meals these days.

Then on Sunday, it would start the cycle again.