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By Joanna DelBuono
Brooklyn Daily
It’s the great gravy debate.
Is it gravy or is it sauce? I recently posted on Facebook, “Nothing says Sunday like a big pot of simmering gravy on the stove.” I was promptly reminded by several relatives that it was “Sauce, not gravy.” Their explanation? Sauce was red and served over pasta and gravy was brown served over meat.
Not to me it ain’t.
I don’t care what the sauce-sayers say. Grandma Jenny told me to “Stir the gravy, don’t let it burn.” She never once told me to stir the sauce. It was unheard of.
Grandma Jenny’s Sunday offering consisted of plenty of meatballs, with and without mozzarella in the middle, beef bracciole, spare ribs, and pig-skin rolled up and stuffed with bread crumbs, cheese, and parsley.
After browning in the huge pot, the meat then slowly stewed in the mixture of crushed tomatoes and tomato puree with a healthy dose of tomato paste from early in the morning until we were ready to eat in the afternoon, cooking until it fell off the bones and melted in your mouth.
Her gravy was so legendary that no one, including our neighbors, could resist the temptation of sneaking into the kitchen and dipping a piece of fresh hot Italian bread into the pot and tasting this food of the gods.
Our meal, which promptly began at 2 pm, began with a huge platter of antipasto chock-full of cured meats, cheeses, olives, roasted peppers, and marinated artichoke hearts, followed by some type of pasta (Grandma called it macaroni, no matter what the variety) — unless it was a holiday, and then it was homemade stuffed shells, manicotti, or ravioli. Grandma would never put store-bought on the table — the melt-in-your-mouth meat, and a green salad with arugula picked fresh from our yard.
Desert, which consisted of fruits, nuts, and lots of pastries with a choice of brown or black coffee (espresso in today’s lingo), and dosed with Anisette and lemon rind, ended the Bacchanalian feast.
Today, the above described meal is considered by every chef, cook, and bottle aficionado, as peasant food, but to me it was just very good, very delicious. Nothing says Sunday like Grandma Jenny comfort food — complete with the reddest, meatiest, most delicious gravy I ever ate.
Not for Nuthin™, to those sauce sayers out there, I say, “You can keep your sauce, to me it will always be Grandma Jenny’s Sunday gravy.”
Follow me on Twitter @JDelBuono.
Joanna DelBuono writes about national issues every Wednesday on BrooklynDaily.com. E-mail her at jdelbuono@cnglocal.com.