“Gravy is what Italian-Americans call tomato sauce, the three-hour kind with enough meat to feed a small country. My mother makes a huge pot of it every Sunday. It isn’t so much about cooking as it is about connecting with her heritage.”
— Nancy Verde Barr, Last Bite
Sunday Gravy, aka Sunday Sauce, is a large pot of sausage, meatballs, and rolled-up meat braciola in garlic-laden tomato sauce constantly stirred by Ma or Nana during weekend family gatherings. The pot simmers away on the stove for hours, letting the meat ingredients meld and infuse with the sauce, a low and slow cooking method no quick marinara could ever match. Most families use this time to spend with each other and reinforce family bonds.
The strange and peculiar combination of meat in Sunday gravy is actually the story of Italian immigration to the U.S. and the prosperity they eventually came to find in America, the tail of impoverished Southern Italian women who suddenly found an abundance of food in the U.S.A. Women who added flat iron steak, Italian sausage, and meatballs to their marinara sauce just because they could. Meat, in scarcity in the old country, became a symbol of plenty.
As with most Italian-American foods, Sunday gravy eventually leaped from family food to mainstream American cuisine. There is some contention over the correct terminology of this dish. Early Italian immigrants, being new to America and not speaking English too well, started calling their tomato sauce “gravy” and the trend continued in their home state, mainly in South Philly. The rest of the country calls it sauce. We are fine either way so long as the food tastes the way it was meant.
To replicate the original recipe as best you could be sure to use good tomatoes. Sweat and caramelize the garlic and onions. Use a heavy, thick pot, like an enameled cast-iron or a Dutch Oven, and have patience.
And as Philip Kazan described it so well, enjoy “the subtle malts and brans of the crust and the pallid no-taste of good old Florentine bread. The snaking sour-sweet of the beef, like a slab of porphyry shot through with crystalline onion sugars, salt, and soil-rolled toffee carrots; sparks of bitter thyme and mint oils; the velvet honeycomb of fat.”
