My family doesn’t live near me which is a fact I find depressing around the holidays. I have such fond memories of Easter especially, as I come from a big Italian family where we would all crowd around the table and eat endlessly and talk as the night wore on. We usually had a ham or a lamb, but we always also had lasagna. You could not have a holiday meal in my house without having some red-sauce related dish. It’s no wonder that after a big meal everyone would retire to the chairs and couches to talk and play cards or watch TV and sometimes even fall asleep for a spell before getting up and coming back to the table for coffee and dessert.
Instead of living with just memories of the way things were, I decided it was time to start my own traditions. In the spirit of the season, I invited friends over who didn’t otherwise have plans for Easter Sunday. These were close friends, mind you, but the table will never be like it was when I was growing up. And I am not saying that’s a bad thing. I can’t ever replace my grandfather and his cigars or my grandmother’s laugh, my mother’s cooking and my father’s storytelling or my aunts and uncles, some still with us and some not. But I learned I can find and create a different kind of happiness and joy - one that is important for my kids to experience. The holidays are a great time to celebrate and, well, to enjoy each others’ company and bond through the language we understand so well-food. This is my time to develop my own recipes that my kids will hopefully remember fondly and talk about. My recipes are rooted in the traditions of those holidays past and carry threads of memories.
I play grown-up soccer now that I am 38 years-old and have since I left college. I had a breakthrough in my twenties when I realized I actually got sort of “good” because my mental maturity caught up with my physical. When I played soccer in high school and college, I was a great player and a good athlete, but I wasn’t really thinking about the game and the consequences of my actions-I was just getting out there and playing. It wasn’t until adulthood when I paused to think through plays and moves and why one or the other makes sense, that I actually got better. The same thing is happening to me with food. I grew up watching my mother and grandmother cook and certain recipes were just second nature to me because I had been making them since I was a child. One such dish is the classic red meat sauce. Whenever I meet someone who is around my age and Italian, we always at some point ask each other what our mothers put in the sauce-did they use pork? Did they use ribs? Did they use sausage? Did they use sugar? I always proudly talked about how my mother used ribs, but secretly I knew the ribs were never that good. They were tough and the bone tasted like wood. But they were flavorful so I would add them to my sauce too. This Easter, I reached that soccer peak where my mind intersected with my body, and I suddenly understood the meaning of the ribs in the sauce.
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I made a traditional red sauce with meatballs and let that cook away on the stove. Meanwhile, I made Brasciole as well. However, rather than cooking the brasciole for an hour, I cooked it for a whole day at 250 F. I added some of the sauce from the stove top to create a bath the brasciole rested in with the company of a few meatballs, and let it sit in the oven for hours in a covered pot. I stirred it now and again and added more sauce, red wine or seasonings if I felt like it, but by the time it was Eater dinner, the sauce was dark, deep red and rich. The vegetables that I had thrown in to the sauce (onions, carrots, garlic) and the few meatballs I included in there had all dissolved into the sauce to create a really thick ragu.
It was amazingly delicious, served with sturdy rigatoni. But when I served the brasciole separately, sliced, it was horrible! It was tough, dry, and tasted like cardboard. I realized then that the best part of the meat had come out of it and into the sauce, which made the most amazing sauce in the world, but the meat could go in the garbage. Then I thought about my mom and the ribs and it all clicked. I was always throwing ribs in to copy her, but I never thought about what really needed to happen-you need a fatty meat, like a short rib or a pork rib to flavor the sauce, but also to release fat, marrow, and other parts of the meat into the sauce to thicken it and create that rich and hearty sauce Rachael calls “Sugo.” The key is letting this sauce cook for a very long time until there is no more to extract from the meat. I also personally really like the idea of the oven cooking rather than stove-top to give the pot surround heat.
I think my friends appreciated the meal and the company and I know with time, my cooking will get better and better and become my own. Over the years, people will come in and out of my dining room with memories of a great dish, great wine and good laughs-just as they did when I was growing up.
For Rachael’s rendition of the above dish, see Big Boy Sugo (page 224) in Rachael Ray’s Big Orange Book.
04.15.09 @ 11:37 am
just looked at your Roasted Garlic and Chicken Double Dumpling Stoup — I can’t see where it ever calls for garlic, except in the instructions. How much, how big? Fairly new in the kitchen.