Tony and I have food issues.
Not going to go into too much detail, but I can tell you that one of us (not necessarily me) doesn’t much ascribe to the food-pyramid, balanced-meal school of thought. But that doesn’t mean he can’t cook. The man knows his way around the stove like nobody’s business. He deserves his own Food Network show.
Since I met Tony a year ago, he’s become interested in rediscovering his Italian roots. At Christmas in 2017, for example, he wanted to create the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve for the first time in more than 15 years. Well, I may have had a not-too-altruistic hand in that decision. That Christmas was my first without my kids, and without the Polish tradition of Wygilia, which we celebrated every year. Sure, there were times when one of them may have been galavanting somewhere around the world, but to not be around any of them – at all?
And, I can’t endure do-nothing Christmas Eves. My history is steeped German Lutheran tradition, which included dinner, a trip across the street to the Emmel’s, where my parents could get a Hot Toddy or two, and our children’s program at church. Afterward, all the kids would get gift bags filled with candy. Christmas Eve and tradition go together. There has to be something. So Seven Fishes it was.
Now, slightly more than three months and one religious holiday later, the idea of Sunday’s spaghetti sauce bubbled up from the recesses of Tony’s memory that Easter weekend in Scranton. Attending service at St. Lucy’s, stopping by Catalanos, and tooling through his old West Side neighborhoood naturally brought up visions of his loving, bustling childhood, in an Italian home, nestled in an Italian neighborhood.
So, back in Waldorf, Maryland, we went to Nick’s, the premier Italian butcher and grocery in town, where we picked up our ingredients, many of them grown “over there.” Tony mixed up his ground round and fresh Italian sausage, added the spices and then let the mixture sit for at least an hour. Even then, the aroma was awesome. Later, when it was time to form those delectable, round meatballs — something I thought we would do together — I was relegated by the master chef to the role of spectator. That’s ok. I’m good cheering from the sidelines, too.
The meatballs went into the oven and the sauce came together in the stock pot on the stove. Then came the hours of excrutiating patience, going through our Sunday routine ignoring the redolence of the bubbling concotion just in the next room.
As winter has lingered and overstayed its welcome, Tony’s spaghetti sauce and meatballs, with its aromas and spices and memories of Scranton, chased the chills away.
As Tony’s Nonno Mancini used to say, Mangia, everyone!
Finding Scranton 