Canzano: My Italian grandmother... and her red meat sauce

Happy Mother's Day.

My grandmother, Mary, and grandfather, Tony, on their wedding day.

My Italian grandmother, Mary, was an amazing cook. I don’t have to squint very hard to see her standing over the stove in her kitchen, stirring a pot of red meat sauce. She stood maybe 5 feet tall, but was a giant with a sauce pan.

Mary was the eldest of seven children. Her parents were immigrants from Calabria who barely spoke English. Her father settled the family in a small steel town, Vandergrift, about 35 miles outside of Pittsburgh. He got a job in the mill making 12 cents a day.

Her mother went to the hospital in the winter of 1933 with abdominal pain. She never came home. She died at the age of 46 during surgery to have her appendix removed.

My grandmother was 14.

She quit school to raise her younger siblings. The family lived in a small home in the 400 block of Lowell Street. It had a brick oven in the backyard. I made a trip and visited her old neighborhood 15 years ago. The house was gone. Neighbors told me it fell apart. The lot was narrow and overgrown with brush, but I waded into the backyard and was delighted to find remnants of an old brick oven on the ground.

As a teenager, my grandmother began her week by kneading 50 pounds of flour into enough loaves of bread to feed her father, sisters, and brothers for the week. There was laundry to be done, and children to raise, but once a week, she spent her day baking bread in that outdoor oven. During my visit, I got down on a knee by the pile of bricks in the backyard. My eyes were glassy, but my heart was full.

My grandmother didn’t own a new jacket that belonged only to her until she was married and in her 20s. The children shared clothing, the family didn’t have a car, and the kids entertained themselves by playing in a park on the corner down the street. I asked my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Frannie, what games the kids played.

“We played kickball, not baseball or softball,” Frannie told me. “In those days, all we had was maybe one ball in the neighborhood.

“Nobody had a bat or a glove.”

Today is Mother’s Day. I hope you honor yours in some significant way. I’d love to hear stories about what made your mother or grandmother special. Drop them in the comment section. But I keep coming back to my grandmother’s red meat sauce and how much it still means to me.

I’ll publish the general feel of the recipe here sometime in the coming weeks. I don’t think my grandmother ever bothered to write it down. But it included hot Italian sausage, fresh tomatoes, garlic, and seasonings. It was a sprinkle of this, and a dash of that. I never saw measuring spoons or cups. But often I observed her measuring a small handful of salt in the palm of her hand before dumping it in. I’d look at my hands, then hers. They weren’t the same.

She’d taste the sauce.

Then, adjust.

In the end, it was always perfect.

If you have a family recipe that was crafted over a generation by a mother or grandmother, you’ll understand what I’m about to say. I can’t quite duplicate my grandmother’s recipe. I can make a close replica on my best days in the kitchen, but there’s always something not quite right. It’s like an expert art dealer seeing a good fake of a Picasso or Rembrandt hanging on the wall of a museum.

It’s all there, isn’t it?

But also something’s off.

I know precisely what it is — my grandmother isn’t at the controls. She died in 2002. After her funeral, we sat around her kitchen and told stories. She always took great pleasure in feeding us all. It was how she showed her love. It was often some kind of pasta and red meat sauce. And, a dish of ice cream or homemade cookies for dessert. She’d approach her grandchildren in the hallway of her house before we went home, and slip us each a $5 bill.

It came with strict instructions: “Put it in the bank.”

Whenever I deposit at an ATM, I still think, “Put it in the bank.”

Funny how people always stay with us, isn’t it?

---

I appreciate all who support, subscribe, and share this independent endeavor with friends and family. If you haven’t already — please consider subscribing and gifting a subscription to someone who would enjoy it.

This is an independent reader-supported project with both free and paid subscriptions. Those who opt for the paid edition are providing vital assistance to bolster my independent coverage.