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NewsFeed 08/06/2010 | 4:18 PM
Is it Sauce or Gravy? Tell us what you think.
Get your $25 Gift card for Pepe’s Little Napoli in beautiful Carmel-by-the-Sea.!
Growing up in Hoboken, we called it gravy. Today our kids call it sauce. What do you call it?
We want to hear your funny or interesting story! In the comment field below, just tell us any story about your childhood that includes pasta sauce or “gravy”, make sure you include your email address, and you’ll get a $25 gift card. It’s that simple.
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When I was a kid growing up in Jersey, I remember the whole neighborhood smelled like tomato sauce. Things sure were simpler back then, but I remember all the smells of spices, oregano, garlic, and watching my mom cook for hours to make dinner. Miss those days!
Gravy for sure!
Growing up in our home, we called anything with “sauce”on it “goolash”!Don’t know how it got that name, what was in it – just was good!!
I couldn’t wait to have my own kitchen and prepare meals for my family. So many of my early childhood memories include me helping my mom cook dinner. It was exciting to begin cooking on my own. One of my first ‘all by myself’ meals was Spaghetti. Growing up in family from the mid-west in the Sixties our version of ‘home-made’ often started with a dry packets of premixed spices. We didn’t have homemade Italian recipes passed down or jarred pasta sauces and I don’t remember lots of different shapes of pasta either. It was Spaghetti or Macaroni or Wide Noodles.
About once every two weeks or so we had Spaghetti with Spaghetti Sauce (which I now understand is Marinara or maybe similar to Bolognese when we added hamburger meat). I was probably ten years old and I got to brown the hamburger meat in a skillet and add the seasoning packet along with canned tomatoes and water. I was as proud to serve that ‘home-made’ Spaghetti then as any Chef in an upscale restaurant is today.
When I was a young kid of elementary school age, my parents religiously took me to a local Italian restaurant for Sunday lunch. Each and every time, I ordered spaghetti with red sauce and became famous with onlookers because I was an expert at curling it around my fork. Either that, or it was the fact that I would devour an awful lot of parmesan cheese and lick the crumbs out of those little paper cups. These days, I still love my pasta with red sauce.
When I was a kid growing up, as a special treat, Mother would make her “pasta shoot”About once every two months. She spent most of the morning on the sauce, which included ground chuck, about 10 cloves of garlics and herbs, tomatoes and chopped red and green peppers.
She would cook up ziti or penne pasta, lather on the sauce , lay on the parmesan and bake it all in the big roasting pan that we used for turkey at Thanksgiving. Eveyone on the block got a share of the pasta.
Did not find out that is was pasta sciutta until I went to college and took Italian for my foreign language requirement.
To this day, I saute some onions with garlic when I want the house to smell good!
When I was a kid and my birthday rolled around, my mother would ask me what I wanted for my birthday dinner. My answer was always “spaghetti!!!” And of course that meant spaghetti with meat sauce. (We called it sauce, not gravy.) I was convinced that meant I was Italian because I loved it so much….even though I’m not at all. But to this day, it is my No.1 comfort food!
As a child growing up in Hamilton Township, NJ., my best friend was Olivia Lucidi. Her Dad,Sparky, owned an Italian restaurant in Trenton. We would love to go there and eat “tomato pies”, some of the best pizza I have ever had. Olivia’s grandmother was an incredible cook and a big treat after school was to go over to their house and watch her grandma make homemade pasta and homemade spaghetti sauce. I can still picture the kitchen and smell the delicious aroma! Good memories!
When I was growing up in the deep south, we didn’t really eat Italian food. We moved to California and went to an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. My brother ordered spaghetti and meatballs. I don’t remember what I ordered but I remember that his meal was better and the red sauce on his spaghetti was delicious!
Growing up in the late 30’s into the 40’s & 50’s we used the word Gravy. & when we talked Italian we used the word RAGU, with the” G “silent. It’s the equivelent of the French word for gravy which is ROUX (x silent)I believe.
After Mass every Sunday all the Guy’s would play stickball & whatever team was at bat, would run up to their respectve apartments, grab a hunk of Italian bread, dip it into the Gravy & then run back downstairs so they wouldn’t miss their ” At Bat “.
CIAO PEPE,……Vito Formica
Growing up in the “Garlic Heights” section of Teaneck New Jersey was a true Italian experience. My Italian grandmother was a great cook and I learned how to make her pasta SAUCE when I was just a kid. It has always been a crowd pleaser. In my early twenties, I lived in Lubbock Texas for a few years. I worked at Texas Tech University and after a few months on the job, I invited several couples to our house for dinner. When I was asked what I was making, I told them, Antipasto and Lasagna, and garlic bread. None of them had ever heard of Lasagna. One couple actually went to the library to see what it was(no internet back then). Two couples politely declined the invitation, and the two couples who came, ate just a bit. In Lubbock, if it “ain’t well done beef and baked potato, it ain’t worth eatin.”
Growing up in a swiss-Italian family we ate alot of pasta!
My very favorite was “Nona” frying onions and garlic in butter and simple pouring in over noodles and adding parmessan cheese.
If it has sausage, brociolli, meatballs and a piece of port it is gravy if it has no meat it can be sauce. We used to go to Interstate Park in Edgewater in the summers with the portable radio to hear the Yankees play breakfast and of course lunch was macaroni because God forbid you should have a sunday w/omacaroni. Many years later I used to camping travelling by motorcycle and the pots for macaroni and gravy came with us. We used to make the sauce ahead and freeze it. But when I did it as a kid at Interstate Park my mother and aunt made it right there on the charcoal barbeques that were provided at the park. talk about dedication. I gotta tell ya, this is a great memory.
I’m from Texas and I grew up calling it “sauce.” What do we know? We do great chicken-fried steak, fried okra and green tomatoes and Tex-Mex. My yankee fiance corrected me quickly. He grew up in Bridgeport, CT in an Italian neighborhood. One of his favorite childhood memories is of fresh pasta drying on all the beds in all the rooms of the house. His Mom used to simmer gravy in huge pots all day. Then, there was this weird/sweet ritual which I witnessed many times over the years. A few minutes before we would all sit down to grace, his Mom calls his Dad, Patsy, to the kitchen to test the pasta. He did not just bite into the pasta like the rest of us. With ceremony and silence, he carefully twirled the strand of pasta in a mound of gravy as we all waited. He tasted, paused….then proclaimed, “It is time.” Then, we all sat down and feasted and laughed and loved. It is definitely “gravy.”
I remember the first few times I tried to make spaghetti sauce. I wasn’t really a kid; I was in college. I had previously learned how to make good barbecue flavored beans by adding barbecue sauce and the secret ingredient — just a few drops of liquid smoke. When I made spaghetti sauce, I started with tomatoes, tomato sauce and paste, hot italian sausage, spices and anything else I could find. The first couple of times it came out great. The third time I remembered how well the barbecue beans had come out with the liquid smoke. But there was a lot more sauce in the pot than there had been beans, so I knew I would have to add a lot more liquid smoke for it to impact the flavor of the sauce. In went a bunch of liquid smoke, and I can still remember the results. After cooking all day, the entire pot of spaghetti sauce tasted, and smelled, like hot dogs! Instead of noodles, I think it would have been a better meal if I had served the sauce with mustard.
As a Texas kid, I knew it as sauce, or even a version sauced up like salsa with deer meat. Having moved back east, I crashed into the confusing term gravy. Although clear in its meaning, it still evokes brown roast beef drippings.
My Mom made spaghetti by mixing the pasta with just a bit of sauce and it was terrible, though she was normally a great cook. Then my new sister-in-law made the pasta and put big scoops of spaghetti sauce on top with grated fresh Parmesean cheese. Delicious and smothered in sauce! It changed my whole attitude toward spaghetti…..
My parents were both Italian/American–mother’s family from Lucca region and father’s family from Genoa. My mother made a great pasta “sauce”–parsley, garlic, onion, celery, tomato sauce and tomato paste–and the real secret–dried porcini mushrooms with reserved water, then freshly grated dried monterey cheese! I try to duplicate her recipe–but it’s not quite the same!
I grew up in San Francisco, where my Mom and Nonni made the best pasta sauce with lots of tomatoes from the yard (yes — in SF!)and fresh garlic. There’s was always a meat sauce with meat from the local butcher shop. (Gravy was the brown stuff served with roast.) The pasta came from the factory on Mission street, where it hung drying on dowels hanging from the ceiling. That was also where we got the freshly grated Parmesan. The bread to go with it came fresh from the Royal Baking Company also on Mission Street.
When my younger brother was in college he was really low on funds and he’d eat just about anything. I remember meeting up with him one day and he said there was nothing in the house for breakfast so he ate a bowl of gravy!
Rich it’s real simple…..if it’s made with meat (any kind) it’s gravy…..no meat it’s sauce
My family come from the South so everything was referred to as gravy. Red gravy, brown gravy, milk gravy, turkey gravey. You name it – it was gravy. Yum To the Love of Food!
Sunday no later than 2 pm we were expected at my Grandparents house. 11 cousins, 6 aunts and uncles.
After a few rounds of football or baseball it was time for dinner.
The GRAVY was started before we arrived. My Grandfather was an avid hunter and always had a MYSTERY meat in the GRAVY. Usual it once flew (like duck or geese) but occasionally in was venison or wild boar. We unanimously boycotted bear meat he brought back from an Alaska trip!
I grew up in California and we called it spaghetti sauce (gravy went over meat and mashed potatoes). Nothing like smelling mom’s homemade spaghetti sauce simmering in the kitchen when I came home from school! BTW…We love Little Napoli in Carmel-by-the-Sea and eat there whenever we visit.
I love the smell of a slow cooked sauce, the aroma of garlic and sweet tomatoes. My favorites are the Vodka Sauce and Arrabbiata Sauce. Memories of my best friend’s home.
When I was little my sister and I would help our grandma make the tomato sauce for the spaghetti and meatballs. We grew up calling is spaghetti sauce. It was so good, I still make it to this day, long after my grandma is gone. My friends from Philly call is gravy.
I grew up in south St. Louis, Missouri, and special occasions called for a visit to “the hill” to eat at one of the many little restaurants in that Italian section of the city. My parents knew a waitress named Mary at Pietro’s. It wasn’t legal, but she really liked my dad and would occasionally smuggle us an (unlabeled) bottle of their specialty salad dressing or a similarly unlabeled jar of their red pasta sauce. They were not for sale back then but favorite customers got special treatment.
Anything at our house was called gravy – being a army bratt and eating SOS – lots and lots of gravy – and gravy is something i really really like especialy the red gravy can’t wait will be coming your way in January all the way from Nebraska. Where RED “the huskers” is my favorate color – see you soon – linda
When I was growing up, my parents used to take me to a wonderful Italian restaurant called Mrs. Batiste’s.
Since I was allergic to wheat, I could not indulge in pasta. But I would put red pasta sauce with plenty of garlic on everything else….. veal, chicken, steaks and risotto. YUM! I still love a great red pasta sauce, especially with a few glasses of a great red wine!!!!
Its Sauce baby!!! Of course you gotta always have lots and lots of sauce. So excited that you have ventured into the sauce business, Bon Apetit!
My grandma lived with us for a while when I was growing up. I can still see her making the little mound of flour to break the eggs in, then carefully roll the dough out & make yummy homemade fusilli. Of course that was then served with her homemade sauce that had been cooking slowly for a few hours. The house always smelled soooo good!
I grew up in San Francisco, and my parents and ever since have called it Sauce. My daughter and her Italian husband call it sauce. Gravy goes on potatoes!
Regards,
Bob Hall
Every Sunday we would have pasta and “sauce” (gravy is what you put on meat) Either my mom or grandma made it. We would never know what meat we would find in the sauce. their cold be pigs feet or pigs bones,chicken parts or some kind of bee…f. We were lucky to have meat in our sauce because growing up in the 50’s and 60’s what ever you had you were grateful for. One funny story I will never forget was one Aunt made lasgna one Sunday we thought nothing of it till we ate it. It was made with american cheese because she could not afford ricott or mozzarella We enjoy it anyway
I grew up on Long Island, and until I was seven we lived in a two family house with numerous relatives including my paternal grandmother originally from southern Italy. It was definitely gravy–with meatballs at least three times a week. When we moved to our own house, since my mother was Irish, for as many years as I can remember my grandmother would send one of my aunts to our house with an white enameled pot meatballs and gravy, tied closed with a dish towel, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sunday was the day all the cousins and aunts and uncles met at Grandma’s for more!
Always been sauce to me and my family (and my fellow restaurant workers). If it goes on Mexican food, it’s salsa. Gravy is what we make w/ turkey parts and put on biscuits or mashed potatoes!
Gravy is gravy and sauce is sauce.Two very different things to me. Gravy goes on potatoes or biscuits, and sauce covers PASTA or anything italian! And I love italian food…… any kind of sauce will do! Anyway……PEPE would pair better with sauce any day!
Every Sunday in my youth the whole family would have lunch at grandma’s and it would always be spaghetti and tomato “sauce” with meatballs, sausage and braciola…good memories. Gravy goes on meat and potatoes. My wife Susanne makes a great sauce but we don’t have every Sunday…just now and than. Always enjoy a bowl of spaghetti…
After my parents got married in 1938 they rented from an Italian family (Armanini) in Richmond, CA. Mom came from a non-garlic (low class flavoring) but learned to use and love garlic. We were such regular guests at the Galileo Club that we became known as the Fouldsinis. Mom’s “Armanini” sauce was simple and wonderful. I have the recipe but it calls for a pint of hot sauce that Mom has written as Madonia. I have no idea what it is (was) so I can’t duplicate the sauce. I never heard of the term for gravy on Italian food until the Sopranos was aired.
My good friend’s father used to take us clamming in the Long Island Sound at low tide on Sunday’s. We’d chopped up the fresh clams and make the best red clam “sauce” you could imagine. We loved picante so we added lots of crushed red pepper. I remember those days well.
Gravy is a traditional southern italian reference. As a child growing up, we referred to ours as sauce. It wasn’t until visiting areas of southern Italy that I heard it referred to as gravy. Either way, sauce or gravy is wonderful!
My good friend’s father used to take us clamming in the Long Island Sound at low tide on Sunday’s. We’d chop up the fresh clams and make the best red clam “sauce”. We loved picante so we’d add lots of crushed red pepper. That was some great sauce!
When I was growing up, we had an early/mid afternoon Sunday meal with my grandparents and cousins every week. It was a great time to get together as a family. The constant menu item every Sunday was a fabulous pasta dish with “Sugo” — not sauce, gravy or ragu. Sometimes it was sugo di pesce, others sugo di carne, sugo di agnello, etc. I can smell it all now like it was yesterday!
Gravy…Sauce…what doesnt taste better with either of them! My mother is a native Brazilian and how she would loosely use the word gravy or sauce for her “mysterious” dishes and toppings! The one vivid memory I have, as a teen, is when she cooked up a fabulous tasting beef dish sliced thin strips grilled to a delight that I can still taste and smell! The sauce, as she called her “special gravy of love”, made my mouth water and crave it again. Later as an adult, she shared her love of gravy with me and it was puree’d tripe, pigs feet and ox tail that was stewed earlier in a “calderon” stock for flavor! LOL! She later then said she added flour, garlic, cilantro, spices and green onions. She said it was her “love gravy” because she said it would put her husband in the “mood”…..so there you have it – the recipe and an aphrodisiac! Yum! Did I mention the grilled beef strips were beef tongue!
I grew up in Northern California in a huge Russian immigrant family. We love our food, and it seems like the Russian culture is not too far off from the Italians because we always have big gatherings with tons of food. We always call it “sauce” and never even used the terminology “gravy”. Growing up I always thought gravy was a “Southern” thing that was poured over buiscits or mashed potatoes. I personally prefer sauce, just like Italians, we Russians love our pasta and tons of sauce to go with it!
I grew up in Southern California but my best friend’s family was off the boat from Italy. Her mom made the BEST paste SAUCE from her grandmother’s recipe. I always wanted to be invited over for dinner on Sunday’s because that is when Mrs. DiGregiorio made Spitsadeadoo. I loved it and I begged for the recipe but she always said it was a secret family recipe and only “in her head.” To this day 40+ years later I remember the taste of that wonderful SAUCE made with fresh tomatoes and chicken. Oh my! I recently reconnected with my long lost Italian friend and was sharing my memory of her mom’s wonderful cooking – and that meal to be exact. I smiled when my friend remembered my love for the Spitsadeadoo and then she smiled when she told me that it was really easy to make chicken cacciatore!!!!!!
Growing up in an Italian household, cooking pasta sauce was the household tradition every Sunday. My mother learned to cook from her mother Felli from Northern Italy, who made pasta and sauce from scratch. Her parties were reknowned for veal, sausage, homemade gnocci, lasagna, and sauce, and she’d say “mangiare, mangiare arrivare forte e grasso” before dinner was served.
growing up with a girlfriend belonging to the Calandrino-Fiatarone family, Italian cuisine was on the table 7 days a week. Pasta was made from scratch, “sauce” ingredients were from the garden, and meals were never eaten before 10:00pm. The waistline took a slight hit, but, boy– nothing like fresh home made marinara (tons of garlic), basil pesto, and various cream/cheese combinations to pour over that just made ravioli, spaghetti, rigatoni, etc., …! Only time anything compared was during a trip to Milano– and of course, LITTLE NAPOLI in Carmel…!! thanks Pepe!
Unfortunately my poor mother was not much of a cook. She raised and cooked for 10 Children (4 sets of twins)and she really was more interested in just putting enough food on the table. She had no backround in Italian cooking but pasta was always a affordable meal and so she tried her best. Her “sauce” was pretty plain. I’ve enjoyed many meals at Little Napoli’s and so I’m excited that their wonderful sauce can now be purchased.
Igrew up in San Francisco with a wonderful Itanian grand-mother, who loved her basement kitchen. She had a lovely kitchen upstairs but preferred her rather chilly downstairs kitchen. In it she had a pale green bin table on which she created many things. One of my favorites was polenta with gravy. My sister and I would keep asking her, as she stirred the polenta, “Is is ready yet, Nona?” We were so anxious for her to pour it out on the bin table in a mound. But then of course, we would have to wait for it to cool a bit before she woud take this beautiful and extraordinary meat gravy from the pot which was simmering on her old and clunky stove top and pour it over our slice of polenta (which had been cut with a thread). O course she graded cheese ove it perfectly just before serving the warm and tasty delight to her little grandchildren. It was the best meal of our childhood because you see, our mother was Irish and did not know or even want to know, how to cook at all. So, as you can imagine, all the really delicious meals we enjoyed were in Nona’s kitchen, in the basement with the pasted walls to keep the cold out and her warmth and expertise at cooking in. And it was her special gravy along with her joy in preparing and serving it to us which I will always fondly remember.
I grew up in Maine and some of my best memories are of my mother humming in the kitchen while preparing her homemade meals including spaghetti sauce. The aroma would fill the house and the thick sauce would fill our bellies on cold winter nights.
I will always remember my grandmother’s authentic Italian cooking. She grew up in Southern Italy and was the most meticulous cook I have ever known. She could cook everything from appetizers to desserts. She planned her meals at least a week in advance and would shop at many different specialty stores and usually for just 1 item to complete her recipes. Her sauces were always perfect for the pasta recipe she happened to be cooking and there were so many recipes.
Usually her sauces cooked all day except for a few fast sauces as she called them…..and every meal had some extra sauce on the table just in case we liked a little more. Her gravy’s were always for non pasta dishes…….meats and fish. I did not realize until I was older that I was eating gourmet food and that cooking was her life. I was only able to get her to teach me one pasta sauce recipe since she did not think it was a man’s place to cook. However, I did eventually get a good deal of her recipes from a woman whom my grandmother taught to cook and her recipes were written down in Italian by that woman she taught. My grandmother’s kitchen was a smell and taste of heaven.
sunday mornings into the afternoon, BIG pot of GRAVY ON THE STOVE, i am so tired about this argument, if any liquid has a MEAT BASE it is gravy, and thats that, it took me 13 yrs to perfect mine, the way my grandma did it, she used a CLAY POT which my cousin still uses, but YES if has meat, pork, beef, veal etc, it IS GRAVY, i still haven t gotten the meatballs right, they were so soft and tasty, some fry them first others bake in the oven, but don t put them in the gravy cause they absorb all the gravy, learned that the hard way, lol, buon apetit!!!
It,s gravy, growing up in Jersey(note you don,t need the New in front of it for everyone to know what your talking about, try that with York, Hampshire, Mexico just doesn’t do it.There was red gravy for the macaroni and brown gravy for your roast beef.
Where I grew up, in Michigan, Mom made spaghetti gravy. It took me awhile to figure out that the spaghetti part referred to only the noodles. And never that grated cheese in a can, always fresh romano on top. Considering there was not a drop of Italian blood in the family, she made an awesome spaghetti sauce, oops, I mean spaghetti gravy!
well, the croations (that migrated to the watsonville area, call it “macaroni w/ meat sauce”)I believe that its actually ziti, for the pasta. My job was to grate the parmesian cheese wedge,that i got to pick through the cold deli display window (and not get any on the floor).
My Mom was Danish/Dutch and a god cook. I can remember her spaghetti SAUCE simmering on the stove and we would have it as a Saturday evening meal unfortunately with the boxed shredded cheese she got at the sotre. ( I won’t dignify it with the proper name.) When I got out on my own (after several years of boxed spaghetti) I decided to make my own SAUCE from a cookboobk. Not knowing what garlic looks like I had no idea what a clove was, so I chopped up a whole bulb and made my SAUCE. My neighbor who was Italian came upstairs and asked what I was doing. Told him and he suggested I learn how to make Italian – A clove was one piece of the garlic!!! What did I know!! But Pete and my boyfriend said it was the best soaghetti SAUCE they ever had! Could never reproduce that, but I make an awesome lasagna. Gravy is for meat and potatoes. I never heard of red SAUCE refered to as gravy until I watched the PBS show with Lidia. I think it’s an idiomatic part of Southern Italian cooking. I may be wrong…
Love to see you again Pepe. After TomatoFest has gone I miss my co-workers and Directors. Best of luck with your new venture. You are the best!!!
Miss you and love to you all.
Lynne and Jim
Almost a year later…….what about “Sugo?” (sp?)