OK, but the folks I learned about the use of meat from were all traditional Italian cooks. Like Sunday gravy, loaded with sausage, bracciole, other meats, then used over “macaroni” and in other dish’s assembly.
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It’s not an American thing, it’s an Italian-American thing, and AFAIK, their Italian from Italy parents’ thing.
The folks I learned about the use of meats in “Sunday gravy” from have all been traditional Italian cooks. Sunday gravy is different in every family, but typically has sausage, bracciole and other meats, and is then used to assemble other dishes, IME.
Probably even more specifically, it’s a southern Italian-American thing. In recent years, there has been an attempt to obliterate the authenticity of southern Italian cooking in favor of Northern Italian cooking. Many Europeans who go to Italy or eat in Italian restuarants in European capitals are most familiar with the cooking for Florence (Tuscany), Venice, MIlan, Bologna and Piemonte. Most Americans are familiar with the immigrant cooking of Sicily and Naples – and in recent years a lot of hoo-hah has been circulated out of New York mainly to say that the dishes of Southern Italy are not the “real” Italian cooking, and that Italians don’t eat many of the dishes with which Americans are most familiar, but eat something much more elegant, without tomato sauce or lots of pasta. Northern Italians east risotto, gnocchi, polenta etc.
But if you are American and go to southern Italy you will recognize a lot of these traditions in what arrives at your table, things you were told by quality newspapers that “real Italians never eat that” . Even in Italy, there is a lot of prejudice against the south and the food traditions there, which many Italians think make Italy look “backwards” in the eyes of the rest of Europe.
Just by chance earlier today, I was reading the blog of a southern Italian who offered the recipe of a sort-of over-the-top baked pasta dish that is not made with lasagne but with a beautiful pasta from Campania that looks like candles and therefore is called candele.
Anyway, this baked pasta dish (which is from the Irpinia area not far from Naples) is made with both bacon (pancetta) and lard ('nzonga in local dialect) plus sheep cheese and an egg!
There is chopped onion in the dish and kind of hard to imagine someone would refrain from tossing in some spicy sausage (very typical of southern Italy) if there was some around needing to be used up.
Anyway, the dish looks pretty amazing when done, and if you are snowed in with 20 other people (Irpinia is a mountainous area), just the perfect thing to pull out of the oven on a freezing cold day
Here’s the recipe (in Italian) for anyone interested.
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Thank you! Same way Southern Italian Americans would be informed that the regional dialect of Italian that they spoke at home was some kind of substandard gibberish, unlike Tuscan, the language of Dante.
Pretty amazing is an understatement - that looks fucking gorgeous!
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I’ve only been there once and it was a LONG time ago, and I honestly don’t remember what I purchased. But I do know it was a favorite on the Boston CH board.
yes. i want.
Hope nobody minds that I take this a bit away from lasagna – but closer to the type of Italian baked pasta dish that uses meat – by adding that something interesting I noticed in the Italian description of the “gorgeous” dish whose picture I posted is that the same area of southern Italy produces an alternate version of this dish where sugar is added to make it sweeter, although it remains a savory main dish, not a dessert. That would make it very reminiscent of a famous baked pasta from Ferrara in Northern Italy, near the Adriatic, which also uses hollow tube pasta instead of flat lasagne, but which adds a rich variety of meats, plus a cream bechamel sauce (not just an egg + sheep cheese) and is often baked inside a very fancy pastry crust that is either sweet or salty
And that dish is very reminscent of a Greek pastitsio
Both northern and southern Italy have a great many Greek influences in their cooking, but the Adriatic north has almost always been much, much wealthier than the southern mainland, with many fabulously rich dukedoms with royal court cultures that developed fancy elaborate dishes. I am wondering if that is why they still look down their nose at a people baking pasta dishes with lard and such, and serving it in such a rustic form.
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Hotoynoodle,
I would give DePasquales Sausage a try.
I believe its worth the trip.
325 Watertown street (rt.16 ), Newton ( about a mile from Watertown Square) .
Around the corner from The Shaking Crab, the new Cajun seafood Place on Adams street, and directly across from the Metro Credit Union.
Tiny place. Two person operation in the Italian section of Newton. Many pastas , some other meats, pancetta, canned tomatoes of all description, parmesean, etc.
Forewarned:
Odd Hours, Open 10a-530p Tuesday through Saturday, Closed Sunday AND Monday ( its a Newton Thing)
There is a DePasquales GROCERY, on Adams street, about a half a mile away, they make a decent Italian sub, but this is NOT the place I am talking about. It can confuse the GPS.
No offense but I think that’s a very unattractive looking dish. As in shiver, please do make me eat that. It’s the tubular pasta.
