Sunday Dinner
Sunday Dinner by Frances Vitali
To this day the smell of burnt food is comforting. Growing up, I remember fondly that cooking was not something my mother enjoyed and she openly admitted her distaste for it. On Sundays my father would do the cooking, giving my mother a chance to relax from her many duties as stay-at-home mom. It also spared us from another burned meal which my mother seemed to do so often that she actually had us believing burned food was nutritious for us.
In addition to cooking, my mother could fix, repair, mend, patch up just about anything in our home-washing machines, dryers, vacuum cleaners and toys of all kinds or create anything that wasn’t already in our home. She did carpentry, plumbing, upholstery, sewing, crocheting, and knitting. We tolerated her burning food because we knew her strengths resided outside the kitchen - in every other room of our home.
So it was on Sundays that my father let my mother take a break from cooking and give us children a break from my mother’s cooking by making one of his favorite Italian recipes: spaghetti, meatballs and brachioles, which is veal wrapped with herbs and spices. After mass on Sundays, we would eat breakfast and then my father would begin the preparations for Sunday dinner. Oddly enough, my father did the food shopping in our family so he always stocked up on cans of whole tomatoes, crushed tomatoes and tomato paste including the Italian seasonings of oregano, thyme, rosemary and sage. With the pride of Papa John’s tomato sauce family recipe, my father would mix the sauce, as he called it, in a big aluminum pot on the stove where the tomato sauce would simmer all day long in the familiar seasonings. He learned how to prepare this meal from watching his own mother. He mixed the ground beef together with his special seasonings patting them into meatballs as he had seen his Italian mother do from memory. My father then would lightly brown the meatballs in a pan before adding them to the sauce. Next came fixing the brachioles, which was always a treat since veal was so expensive. My father would flatten the veal with a meat hammer, sprinkle some more Italian spices on top, roll the thin meat up, tie it together with thread, and place it in the sauce with the meatballs. We would eat the dinner with long loaves of hard, crusty, Italian bread. My father had a habit of gutting the doughy insides of the Italian bread and putting the fluffy innards aside for dipping into the sauce.
I remember my sisters and brothers throughout the day would sneak tastes of the sauce by dipping small pieces of the innards of the bread into the big pot of sauce. We noticed how our dad would taste the sauce from time to time with these reserved tufts of bread as it cooked, saving the crusty shell to eat with the meal at dinner time. When finally time to eat, my father would look at the pot of sauce and say “hey, what happened to all the sauce” with a smile in his eyes. He knew that we were all stealing dips of bread and sauce before dinner - including my mother!
Our Sunday dinner was boisterous and comforting as we crowed together as a family breaking crusty Italian bread together and sharing stories that have now become the sweet, warm, spicy smells of our memories.
My grandmother Assunta Vitali came to Philadelphia from Italy in 1917 having never met her husband-to-be before their marriage. My grandfather, Bernardo, who also emigrated from Italy, owned a butcher shop in South Philadelphia where my father and his four other siblings grew up. My father, Daniel, helped in the family butcher shop and learned to make Italian sausage and brachioles.