Mo’s word for the day is GRAVY.
I talked about GRAVY as an accompaniment to the Thanksgiving Dinner on my other blog: Work of the Poet
HOWEVER 
If you’re Italian you might know about The Great GRAVY vs. SAUCE Debate.
Some Italians call tomato sauce, SAUCE, you know the stuff you put on pasta, and some Italians call it GRAVY.
Some Italians make the distinction between SAUCE and GRAVY when it comes to one ingredient — sauce doesn’t contain meat, gravy does.
But in my husband’s family we call it SAUCE whether it’s Marinara or made with meat. We’ve always thought people from Naples had a tendency to call sauce, GRAVY. Or maybe it was people from Brooklyn.
My husband’s family was from Staten Island and then Queens (New York). They were originally from Sicily.
Our marinara sauce was made with chopped garlic and onions braised in vegetable oil or olive oil, plum tomatoes, sugar, salt and bay leaf. You cooked it ’til it tasted cooked, about an hour and a half or so.
The meat sauce was made in the same way but you added braised meatballs (made from equal parts beef, veal and pork), or sausage, or braccioli (garlic, bread crumbs, cheese, chopped egg wrapped in flattened beaf or veal). The meat finished cooking as the sauce cooked.
No one in my husband’s family ever called the sauce, GRAVY.
After all of that, if you’re NOT Italian feel free to ask any questions you’d like. I have at my fingertips the whole of my husband’s family, and particularly his sister, who is an expert cook.
If you ARE Italian, I’d love to hear what you think about the SAUCE vs. GRAVY debate.
recipes available.
maryt
