The Return Of Sunday Dinner

Why was I all choked up picking up my order from Esposito’s on Saturday afternoon and why did I feel compelled to tell John and George that I was making a gravy on Sunday? It’s probably because I couldn’t remember the last time I made a big Sunday dinner.

You see, we lost three family members in the last several months: my sister, my uncle and my aunt (my mom’s twin who was like a second mother to us). I have found that missing them has also caused me to miss the way things used to be back in the days when my siblings and I were young and without worries, when our parents shielded us from sadness and we were comforted as best we could be, often with food.

One of my earliest memories is sitting in my grandparents’ dining room, surrounded by my uncles with a platter of macaroni, gravy meat and a big jug of wine on the table. There would always be two stains on the tablecloth before the meal was done, one from the gravy and the other from the wine. And my grandmother would insist on tucking a napkin into our collars, even when we got older and it became embarrassing. That embarrassment was a small price to pay for eating such a stupendous meal.

The regular Sunday dinner consisted of the aforementioned pasta, meatballs, sausage, braciole, spare ribs and maybe stuffed pigskin (not the football kind), all dressed with a beautiful tomato gravy. We call it gravy, others may call it sauce.

Then we would have a roast or chicken with salad, stuffed artichokes, peas and mushrooms or peppers. This was the type of Sunday meal my mother or grandmother made every Sunday. Sometimes, my mom would make an American meal, maybe roast beef or a turkey breast with corn fritters, mashed potatoes, gravy and all the trimmings. It would be a great meal but invariably, after it was over, my dad would lean back and say, “You know it just doesn’t feel like Sunday without macs (i.e., macaroni)."

On Sunday morning, we would wake up to the smell of a simmering gravy and frying meatballs. When my mom brought the macaroni to the table, we all had to be seated and my dad would make our dishes. We had to eat while everything was piping hot. As we passed the grated cheese around the table, he would say “buon appetito” and we would answer “altretanto (meaning, “And to you, too”)."

The pasta on a typical Sunday would usually be ziti or rigatoni. If my mom wanted to jazz it up a little, she might make cavatelli or ravioli. We saved rich pastas like manicotti and lasagna for holidays. After dinner, my sister, Lisa and I would wash the dishes while we listened to the Mets on the kitchen radio. Then we would often walk to Court Pastry. In the winter, we would get some pastry or cookies and in the summer, we would buy Italian ices and regina and twist biscotti.

We still celebrate holidays to the hilt but, lately, Sunday dinners have been downsized and put on the back burner. With cholesterol concerns, the kids’ activities, and just plain busy-ness, I rarely make a traditional Sunday dinner. We seem to have dim sum more often than an Italian Sunday dinner. How did that happen?

So, to counter all the melancholy I’ve been feeling and to welcome my lovely niece back home from college for spring break, I decided we would have a good old-fashioned Sunday dinner this weekend. We'd have the works, which would mean getting up early and rolling a couple dozen meatballs, stuffing braciole, peeling garlic, chopping onion, browning meat, throwing tomatoes into a sizzling pot and stirring and hitting the rim of the pot with the wooden spoon every 15 minutes or so for several hours. Figuring out just when to throw the macaroni is a little tricky since everyone is coming from the burbs and traffic is so unpredictable.

But we did it! We had a dinner just like the ones we used to have, consisting of a little antipasto, macaroni, gravy meat, chicken, salad, peppers, asparagus, Court Pastry cookies, some Monteleone miniatures, Caputo bread, a Junior’s strawberry cheesecake and even a couple of tablecloth stains.

There was no better way to show our kids and ourselves that life, love and traditions can and will go on.