52 Ancestors Week 48: Family Recipe

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 48:

The theme for Week 48 is “Family Recipe.” Who made the dish that made holiday meals “complete”? Who was the best cook in the family? (Or who was the worst?) This would also be a good week to write about a favorite family recipe and the memories you have surrounding it. 

I think you can see where this is going.

I’m not about to throw anyone who has ever cooked for me under the bus. Why would I? Everyone in my life has been a great cook! Even my dad! Though, he has experimented with a few oddities over the years. I still can’t stomach liver and onions and I’d like to meet someone who can eat that dish!

My mother has always been the one who made holiday meals complete. She would make lasagna for us for Thanksgiving and the dish just makes the holiday meal complete. I honestly can’t imagine Thanksgiving without it, meatballs, sausage and braciole. I usually have that after a little bit of a turkey appetizer. Sure it’s heavy, but, the food coma is so worth it!

I bet you’re all stuffed looking at that image to your left. The recipe is prettily simple. You take the noodles and add layers of sauce, mozzarella and ricotta cheese and bake it in the oven. Many Italian families usually put in meat in between the layers of pasta. For some reason we’ve never used meat. This is probably because we had meatballs and sausages as a side dish.

Seeing pans of lasagna now often brings back memories of prior Thanksgiving feasts. Long before we ever had Thanksgiving in Virginia with my brother and his family we would have Thanksgiving at our house in Salem and our guests of honor would be my grandma Ollie and her sisters from time to time. Usually it was just Ollie because she lived in the next town over in Haverhill. Can you say convenient? It sure was! I loved having grandma Ollie nearby since my other grandparents were far away.

Now, you might think Ollie would be skeptical of someone who wasn’t Italian making lasagna. She never said anything bad about the cooking. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Ollie would give you the shirt off of her back! She would comment on my mom’s cooking and maybe offer a tip or two. I’m not even sure what prompted my mother to start making it all those years ago. Perhaps she just wanted to try it out.

The “worst” thing she probably ever did was talk to my mom about her mom Clementina’s cooking and how she prepared certain dishes. I remember asking her about certain recipes and she always smiled and said “It was always a pinch of this or a pinch of that. We used whatever was available.” That was true. I mean the Carrabs clan had five daughters to feed. Who had time to write things down? Don’t worry. She did! Some recipes are in the family. They’re just with various cousins at the moment.

While cousins had the recipes, we had Clementina’s rolling pin and ravioli cutter. My father once put both to good use when he made cheese ravioli. They turned out so good! The only problem was that it took so long to make! I know good food takes time to make. I just wouldn’t use it for Thanksgiving unless you start making it that Tuesday!

Anyway, seeing the dishes bring back a lot of memories of previous holiday dinners with the family. Ollie and my dad would talk about her parents, who he and his cousins called Nonmie and Nona. Oddly, they never really talked about Thanksgiving at their house.  Believe me, I’ve tried asking how they celebrated Thanksgiving and I never really got a solid answer from anyone. Maybe some things are best left to the imagination.

I do recall someone saying that  Giuseppe would use the holiday to test out his homemade wine. Giuseppe and his brothers Rocco and Pasquale had their own wine cellars and would make wine from the grapes they grew in their yards. My father and his cousins always told me Giuseppe’s wine was very sweet and that his brothers had very strong wine. I wonder if that was because my great-grandfather grew his grapes in the lush Merrimack valley. Or maybe he just picked them at a better time.

Either way, Thanksgiving was usually a time where we’d swap a lot of the family stories. My brother and I would just eat the lasagna and listen to our parents and grandma entertain us with stories from their youth or something Ollie remembered from the past.

The one thing she never did was criticize my mom’s cooking. Before we started eating she’d say “This looks so good, Diane!” She then looked to my brother and I tell us to “mangia”. 

She didn’t have to tell us twice! We were more than happy to dig in. My favorite part has always been the middle side. My brother on the other hand preferred the corners and the crunchy pasta. You can tell a lot about a person from which part of the lasagna they take!

Even today seeing a pan of lasagna brings those memories back to me. I close my eyes and picture my grandmother cooking alongside my mom in the kitchen. They’d be laughing and swapping stories and I’d come in for a visit. For the record, I was never hit by a wooden spoon for sneaking a peek or getting a snack. I wasn’t that naughty! I did, however, try to sample the banana crème pie a few times. Hey! It was good! It’s the perfect dessert to go with a meal like this!

Though, you won’t be able to move after eating. 

See ya next time! And if you’re in America, have a great Thanksgiving!