Food and Family

I grew up in a family that didn’t prioritize time in the kitchen. My grandparents preferred Burger King over McDonalds because, as Grandma pointed out, the Whopper came with “salad” on it. This is the same woman who once served us a dessert of mixed pistachio and tapioca puddings (my mother took her children into the bathroom one at a time, where she helped us dispose of the concoction down the toilet). My mother herself regularly served something she called MacToBeef, which was a pound of cooked macaroni noodles mixed with a pound of browned ground beef and a can of stewed tomatoes. I don’t think she even added salt. So as a family, we ate (obviously), and some of it was tasty (not including the MacToBeef), but cooking as a hobby was not a thing. I wasn’t sad or sorry about it–I didn’t know any better. I didn’t really think about food beyond the need for sustenance.

In college, however, I met the man who would become my husband, and that all changed. Dean is half Italian (the dominant half, as anyone with Italian heritage knows). His family lived near our school, and as our relationship matured, I started going home with him on the weekends–which is when I was introduced to Sunday dinner, Italian style. We had pasta with red sauce every Sunday after church, and there were a LOT of people there. Grandparents, siblings, cousins, family friends. There are various names for this red sauce–some Italian families call the red sauce “gravy,” some “sugo;” our family calls it “sugu.” There are as many different ways to make it as there are people. My mother-in-law’s sugu doesn’t taste the same as Uncle Juju’s, or Aunt Tiny’s, or Aunt DeeDee’s, and that’s just within the same family. I was soon to learn that some recipes include red wine, and some include sugar; some use tomato paste, some canned tomatoes, some fresh tomatoes, some a combination. I was fascinated.

During my senior year of college, I needed a Cultural Anthropology class to graduate, and I was not excited about it. My professor, however, included in the syllabus the opportunity for an independent study. I proposed a semester-long project analyzing experiences from my sophomore year abroad, but he was unmoved–I was not a cultural anthropologist then, apparently, but was now (after one class). In desperation, I proposed a study of Italian food and its role in family and religious life. He loved the idea! So I proceeded to get four hours of credit for spending weekends at my boyfriend’s house and learning how to cook from his mother.

I loved it. When I asked Angie for the sugu recipe, she told me it wasn’t written down–I’d just have to get up at 6:00 on Sunday morning and watch her make it before church. She would toss or sprinkle in various spices and say things like “I think that’s around a teaspoon” and include statements like “you have to boil it fast for at least 15 minutes or it won’t work.” For my final “exam,” I helped make a lasagna and presented a portion to my teacher along with a miniature cookbook of the recipes I’d gathered. Easiest “A” I’ve ever gotten. I have told this story for years, and how I really pulled a fast one on my professor, as I would have spent those weekends with my future family anyway. But recently, I’ve been rethinking that position, and believe I have not been giving my professor enough credit.

Those thoughts really crystallized for me last night. Three generations of our family gathered for Mother’s Day yesterday, and after eating pasta and manicotti–with plenty of sugu–we watched the new Vince Vaughn film “Nonnas” (streaming on Netflix). In the movie (based on a true story), the main character decides to honor his recently deceased mother by starting a restaurant in her memory and staffing it with neighborhood nonnas (grandmothers). The movie is about food, and family, and especially about how the right food and atmosphere can really feel like home–whether it’s your home or not. I realized that is exactly what I learned through my cultural anthropology independent study. I probably would have figured it out eventually, once I married into the family (which involved a LOT of Italian cookies, but that’s another post), but I certainly didn’t understand it before that class. Italians aren’t the only ones to have such a connection to and through food, but to someone without that background it absolutely is a cultural distinction, and a characteristic to treasure.

My sugu doesn’t taste just like my mother-in-law’s, even though I use her base recipe. My sons have learned how to make it too, and theirs is a little different from mine. That reality is unlike the movie, where the main character was trying to recreate his nonna’s recipe exactly. But I like the variations. I like that there is history in the sauce, but there also is future. The future of our family, and how they make the meal their own. The Wikipedia entry on cultural anthropology starts by saying that it is a branch of anthropology “focused on the study of cultural variation among humans.” That variation is one of the things that makes the world so interesting. And you can taste it in our sugu.