Italian food!!

Originally Posted by Nightengale212

My maternal grandparents were from Manfredonia in the province of Foggia, so of course I am partial to Italian cuisine. But I must admit having traveled to Italy although I found the food wonderful, it is fairly different than the American Italian food I was raised on. I think this has to do with my grandparents who were already in the US during the Great Depression which was a time when it was difficult to get a variety of foods, so many of the American Italian recipes that evolved during that time were made from what was available. Since meat during that time was expensive and considered a luxury, many of the recipes were meatless since available meat was reserved for Sunday meals. And that is the reason why you hear American Italians differentiate Sunday sauce from Wednesday sauce because the latter usually had no meat. Although the economy improved by the time I was born in 1957, those recipes as my late mother would call "poverty recipes" remained and it was those recipes were what I was raised on because they were tasty. This would be a typical weekly menu in my house. BTW, my father was 100% Irish but fortunately early on developed a taste for Italian food and he learned very quickly to raise a vegetable garden.

Monday - Left overs from Sunday dinner
Tuesday - Omelet - Eggs, potatoes, peppers, onions, and sometimes mushrooms
Wednesday - Pasta - Marinara sauce or a sauce made with pepperoni - garden vegetables
Thursday - Soup - Chicken escarole or vegetable beef made with soup bones
Friday - Fried fish which was usually caught by a family member as we lived by the water
Saturday - Pizza purchased from several of the great Italian pizza places in town
Sunday - Pasta with meat sauce that included meatballs, sausage, and pork - roasted chicken - garden
salad - bread, bread, and more bread

My grandmother although she was a great cook was more known for her baking skills. She had a little home business making Italian cookies for weddings and other functions, and she taught her baking skills to several of her brothers who opened bakeries. She also taught her brother-in-law how to bake and he went on to become one of the first baking instructors at Johnson & Wales University when they established a culinary program and Emeril Lagasse was one of his first students. I still have my grandmother's baking recipes mostly written on scraps of paper, and in a few weeks I will be pulling them out when I start my Christmas baking.

Buon Natale e Buon Capodanno