Our friend, Mikey S., born and bred and lived his whole life here in our little borough, took me a few months back to see
Mark Strausman give a cooking demo at
De Gustibus. Mikey has become chummy with Strausman over the years and after the demo a number of us chatted. Well, out of the blue in the mail yesterday was a copy of Strausman's and
Pino Luongo's Two Meatballs in the Italian Kitchen, inscribed to me by Strausman, and all of it Mikey's doing. Grazie mille, Mikey.
And it's a great read, this cookbook. All of the homages and disconnects and insults of the two friends that are the conversation between traditional Italian regional cooking and Italian American cooking.
Reading chapter 2,
The Great Meatball Debate, I suddenly understood something in one of my own family traditions that I'd seen a thousand times before but never given much thought to. How my Mom
serves meatballs.
(Sidenote: I spent most Sundays of the first 8 years of my life at my Grandmothers' apartment in the Bronx, as did all of her children and their young families. My southern Italian grandmother's meatballs and my Italian American mother's meatballs are very different - maybe not as different as northern Italian Luongo's and Jewish American Strausman's meatballs, but way different.)
So, my realization.
Like most Italian Americans my Mom cooks her meatballs (and, in the older family days and still for big dinners, her sausage, veal, pork,
braciola, or whatever she chooses) in her tomato sauce. First brown the meat, then into the sauce. (Strausman doesn't brown the meat first. To the barricades!) But then, unlike in the Italian American spaghetti and meatballs tradition, she doesn't server the meat on the pasta. But she also does not quite serve the meat after the pasta as a separate course. The meat gets put into it's own serving bowl, with sauce, and appears on the table after the pasta. Like maybe, literally less than a minute after the pasta, but after the pasta and not before. Then some of us put the meat on our plates along with the pasta, and some of us eat the meat after the pasta, but no one puts the meat on their plate before the pasta.
A small step in the lifelong process of understanding one's family.
And today's only Saturday and there's still time to shop for Sunday dinner!
