Note: This is a long one and you have to follow along very carefully...
Anthony,
Recently a local food consultant made a statement in our local newspaper which I found..well, odd. The statement was (is) ..."Spaghetti and meatballs-there is nowhere in Italy where that exists." As far as I know, my bloodline is 100% Italian. My grandparents (all 4) emigrated from Bisceglia (father's folks) and Naples (mother's folks)in the 1920s, to the Greater Boston area. My parents (1st generation Italian Americans)grew up with a basic staple of Italian cooking and raised me and my brothers in the 1950s and 1960s on the foods that were brought over from Italy in the 1920s. Spaghetti and meatballs and braciole was a standard meal on Sundays. They had it as a standard meal on Sundays in the 1930s and 1940s as well. I would like to make a correction to the statement made by our local food consultant, but I don't have positive proof that there are current, or past, recipes in Italy that included both spaghetti and meatballs. I have consulted my parents on this, but they can get no more specific than "Of course it's from Italy, are you crazy?". Well, I'm not, but I can't really go to the local food consultant with that as my counter point to the statement alleging that spaghetti and meatballs are not found in Italy. Can you offer any advice, references that I can view on line, or other location to go in order to further my case for a correction to our food consultant? Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
 Paul J. Rana ~ Bigfork, MT
Hi Paul,
Sorry just now getting back to you on this. I have been totally swamped with work and very backed up with email. I have been getting a few emails on this very subject of the history behind Spaghetti Sauce and Meatballs. Very interesting! I have been doing some investigating myself on this. I am finding out a lot about my family history in the process :-) Below I have placed some on going correspondence between a visitor of my site that had the same questions as you. I got my mom into the conversation too! :-) Well, turns out I have this cousin Gus that has done a lot of work with the family tree investigating stuff and he also wrote a book about Ellis Island where all the Italian immigrants had to go before they came into America a while back. Well.... read more about it below. Some very interesting stuff. There will be more to come on this so I will try to keep you in the loop on our conversations. happy Cooking!
Ciao,
~8-) Anthony
Anthony,
You have a wonderful site! The sauce I make is very similar to yours, with the exception that we use sausage instead of pork chops, and sometimes (when making for myself, cuz I don't like sausage) I just put in several fennel seeds for the flavor. (That should work for the person on your Sauce Talks section who wanted to eliminate the pork for her Jewish friends.) Recently, I have started to use cans of crushed tomatoes instead of puree, and the result is amazing! I cannot wait until I have some time to try your Ratatouille and Eggplant Parmasan. My Sicilian Great-Grandma Milone came to Pickfaux, Louisiana from Palermo, Sicily in 1911 with her familiy when she was only two. She is where we got our method of preparing our family's sauce and meatballs, but, alas, she passed away when I was only 11, and I never got to ask her many of the questions I have.
Really, the reason I write is because I was trying to find out a little on the history of the origination of spaghetti and meatballs, as we know them now, cooked together. I think your mom's mom may have possibly derived her methods from the same roots as my Great-Grandma Milone (Tortorice), and was hoping you may know how the recipe came to be as we know it. I have done a little research, and, from what I gather, pasta with a tomato and meat sauce was made popular by Italian-Americans from Sicily & Naples in the United States between the late 1800's and World War II to satisfy an American craving for red meat... Do you know where your family developed thier methods of preparation? Sincerely,
Sarah Morini
Hi Sarah,
Sorry for delay in response. I have been swamped with work. Glad you enjoyed the site. It's a labor of love! :-) I am looking into the history on this now. Coordinating with my mom. My mom said she is forwarding your email onto my cousin Gus, who was very good friend with my grandmother and new my great grandmother as well. Gus also has written a book about Ellis island and all the Italian immigrants that came through that Island, my grandmother being one of them. He has also done extensive work on My mom's family tree (The "Salerno" side). So, anyway, when I hear back from Gus we should have some really good information on this :-) from WHAT I REMEMBER, My grandma Salerno came over here when she was ABOUT 9 years old and she learned all her cooking from her Mom who lived in Italy all her life. She learned how to make the Spaghetti Sauce and Meatballs from her mom whole lived in Italy. I'm thinking that this is a traditional meal that they actually made in Italy, but I'm foggy on the details of how my grandmother came here. If her mom, my great grandmother came to America with her then she could have picked up the recipe here and my grandmother learned how to cook this from her mom when she was here in America. I'm hoping cousin Gus can shed some light on this subject. More of the story to come I hope.
Ciao,
~8-) Anthony
P.S. If you ever write something official up on the subject of the History of Spaghetti Sauce and Meatballs I would love to be able to throw it up on my site or link to it somewhere. Let me know if you ever write something about this subject. You have me interested in it now as well. I always just took it for granted that it was an authentic traditional Italian meal.
P.S.S Here is a little interesting note I just read on this site:
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=473476
Trivia; Did you know?
Pasta existed for thousands of years before anyone ever thought to put tomato sauce on it. The Spanish explorer Cortez brought tomatoes back to Europe from South America in 1519. Even then, almost two centuries passed before spaghetti with tomato sauce made its way into Italian kitchens. Talking about spaghetti and meatballs: the Italians ate meat only a few times a month. When they arrived in America, where meat was so plentiful, they incorporated meat into their cooking more often, making meatballs an American invention. The first American pasta factory was opened in Brooklyn, New York, in 1848, by a Frenchman named Antoine Zerega. Mr. Zerega managed the entire operation with just one horse in his basement to power the machinery. To dry his spaghetti, he placed strands of the pasta on the roof to dry in the sunshine. The stuff that makes tomatoes red may possibly aid n reducing the risk of prostate cancer. In a study from 1986 to 1998, evidence was found in men who ate a diet rich in "tomato sauce, ketchup or other tomato-based products containing the powerful antioxidant known as lycopene were up to one third less likely to develop the disease."
Click here for more follow-up email on this very interesting subject of Spaghetti Sauce and Meatballs history. There was much more correspondence on this subject!
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