52 Ancestors, Week 14: Spaghetti Sauce

petrini1

April 3

Every week, genealogist Amy Johnson Crow encourages participants in the 2024 "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" project to explore family history through the lens of a weekly theme. This week, the theme is Favorite Recipe. I am writing today about my Italian grandmother in the kitchen, standing in front of the stove, stirring tomato sauce for pasta.

My grandmother, Mary Piccioli Petrini

This reminiscence is not what you are expecting.

Yes, I still remember the smell of tomato sauce simmering on the stove in my paternal grandmother's kitchen when I was very young. Like most authentic Italian cooks, Grandma did not give in to the odd American custom of adding sugar to her spaghetti sauce. Instead, she added shredded carrots. That is what Italian grandmothers did when the acidity needed cutting. It's what her own mother did back in Italy.

If she was making meat sauce, she might pull out her sausage grinder, clamp it to the edge of the table, and let us watch while she fed chunks of meat into it. I can remember that smell, too, and what it looked like, lumpy and glistening, as it was extruded from the grinder. Unlike with the tomato sauce, I found this smell unpleasant. They say you should never watch sausage being made; it may be part of why I'm a vegetarian. But usually, Grandma just made tomato sauce, sometimes with meatballs to go with it. And her tomato sauce was so, so good.

And then, when I was about ten years old, she stopped making it. And I never had her tomato sauce again. No, Grandma did not pass away. She did not move to a nursing home or develop an allergy to pasta. Something else happened that changed her spaghetti sauce forever.

1970s ad for Ragu spaghetti sauce.

My Italian grandmother discovered Ragu.

I remember how her blue eyes widened and she turned positively giddy as she described what she'd bought at the grocery store that day. "Look at this!" she gushed, sounding like a teenager. "You just pour it out of a jar and heat it up! It's easy!"

Down Main Street at my other grandmother's house, Nana was disturbed by the new popularity of spaghetti sauce in a jar. She was more old-school. But Grandma embraced change. She never made her own spaghetti sauce again.