It was invariable, almost as inevitable at fate itself. It was what we did every Saturday. We made the sauce. That’s what we called it, making the sauce. We didn’t call it gravy or ragu`. I don’t remember ever skipping a Saturday. That would have been an event I’d remember. We eat macaroni every Sunday with the sauce and meatballs and sausage meat. We might also occasionally make it during the week too but we made it every Saturday for Sunday dinner.
Our days and hours rarely varied. For every single person’s birthday in our family there was a party where everyone in the family came. We swam in the summer and went on picnics. We skated and sledded in the winter. We biked and climbed trees and played in all good weather. In each of our kitchens on Saturday we made the sauce.
First after we had made Grandmother’s 1,2,3,4 cake, (a simple pound cake) “. . .in case someone drops in.” Which they did and some cookies too. Then we made the sauce.
We started with two pounds of sausage because as my mother told us. “When I was first married I’d only make one pound of sausage and your father would come home from work for lunch and start eating it out of the frying pan. And I’d say, ‘Peter, I’m not going to have any left for tomorrow.’ Then I realized, hey he works hard all week, why shouldn’t he eat it if he wants it? I just have to buy more. So every Saturday we started the sauce by frying two pounds of Italian sausage and set aside one pound of the sausage for our lunch.
We set the sausages into a big frying pan, almost covering the sausage links with water. We pricked both sides of the each link with the tip of a knife or with a fork so that fat melted into the pan as the water evaporated. That way you knew for sure that the pork had been thoroughly cooked. Then we browned the sausage in the fat that had melted into the pan and you had nice browned sausage. The smell of beautifully fried sausage with all the gorgeous fat adhering to the sides of the frying pan is the smell of starting a sauce. Sometimes we dipped a piece of Spinelli’s bread in the grease and ate one link while you were cooking it. My father always grabbed a piece or two before lunch as soon as he came in the door. Maybe we started with 3 lbs. I don’t see how there would be enough left for both the sauce and lunch otherwise.
We ate the sausage with a salad and a fresh loaf of Italian bread delivered to us by Spinelli’s that morning. Dad worked most Saturday mornings and when he came home he was hungry.
By then we were setting the table, making the salad, cutting the bread, making a pitcher of lemonade for all of us or fixing my father a glass of cold coffee from the left over coffee from the morning. All of our drinks were flavored with lots of sugar. No one in my family was overweight. We all worked and played so hard it was rarely an issue.
After lunch we’d mix the meatballs.
