We Loved Food - by Dom Capossela

Italian American families were dutiful. In the morning, everyone pushed off to go to work, to school, or stayed at home to clean, cook, and care for the little ones. But whatever we did during the day, come evening we all converged on the dinner table.
We loved food and cherished our wide-ranging culinary repertoire. I’m talking great meals, whether the pedestrian broccoli with pasta and chicken, or the outrageous production of the universally celebrated Sunday feast, the Gravy.

Picture a large pot, a cauldron, maybe, crammed with assorted meats including perhaps, a pork roast, London broil, spareribs, pig’s feet, hot or sweet Italian pork sausages, chicken feet, or skirt steak pounded thin, heavily seasoned, and rolled then tied into a braciola and set carefully so it wouldn’t unravel, into the simmering pot of seasoned Italian tomatoes. There, for hours, all the meats blissfully stewed, one on top of the other and side by side The meats varied from week to week depending on what the butcher had or our budgets, except that always, always, ALWAYS the pot held a generous supply, of what? What meat did I fail to mention? “Spaghetti and?”  That’s right. Our iconic Italian meatballs, the sine qua non of every Sunday Gravy.

We spent a lot of time at the dinner table. Eating. Drinking. Talking. Asking questions. Responding. Encouraging. Criticizing. Gossiping. Laughing, intuitively passing on millennia of whispered recipes, respect for art, love of music, love of love. The dinner table is where, across the years, we developed social skills, emotional resilience, and a sense of security. With such a magical background, we were ready for all the excitement life could throw at us.