Italians and food: A match made in heaven

One of my favorite scenes in The Godfather has nothing to do with the mob. Michael wanders into the kitchen while the Don's men are on lock-down at the Corleone compound. Clemenza is making dinner for a small army. He gives Michael life lessons and recipes at the same time. It's a very Italian moment. Food is the red hot center of Italian life. Recipes and traditions get passed down as they had for centuries -- around the cooking fire, where the family assembled.

Food rituals ruled our lives, and I've never met an Italian who can't cook. Either you grew up cooking, or you grew up watching people cook. After Grandma Gentile died in 1965, dad took over the annual Sausage Day tradition. Sometime after Thanksgiving, the Gentile siblings gathered in the basement of our house in Bellwood and used the second kitchen to make 100-or-so pounds of Italian sausage.

Everybody pitched in, and Grandma Gentile's epic dining table became a factory. The tradition endured for decades uninterrupted or altered. Grandma's steel, hand-crank, meat grinder clamped to the side of the table. Aunt Jeanette always brought the casings from the butcher in the Old Neighborhood. Dad would haul in waxed cardboard boxes filled with wrapped chunks of pork shoulder. And then the assembly line began.

The meat was carefully trimmed, and the casings washed. Each took a turn at the hand crank. The complicated, unwritten process of preparing, grinding, seasoning, sampling, seasoning again, filling the casings, and packaging the sausage took an entire day. When they work ended, stacked packages in heavy waxed paper held coils of freshly-made Italian sausage in sweet, medium, or hot, each carefully marked and distributed among our families and friends.

Our aunts each ran smaller home factories, where they cranked out enough cookies, cakes, cannoli shells, ravioli, bread, and confections to stock a medium-sized bakery. They distributed the bounty in department store shirt boxes lined with tissue and waxed papers. The boxes of cookies and packages of sausage went out to all the people important to our family. Because during war or peace, the army's got to eat!

​What were your family traditions?

Decades later, I asked Aunt Jeanette how to make sausage. I told the above story to some friends who also like to cook, and they wanted to make sausage the Gentile way. The conversation with Aunt Jeanette went something like this:

​Me: How much meat do I get to make sausage?
Her: However much you want.
Me: What kind of spices?
Her: Whatever kind you want.
Me: How much of what kind?
​Her: If you want to make a batch?
Me: How much is in a batch?
​Her: About 40 or 50 pounds.
​Me: Yes, a batch of Italian sausage like you used to make.
​Her: Why didn't you say that? Get 40 or 50 pounds of pork shoulder. Trim off all the fat. You grind the meat once with the medium attachment and season it with a handful of salt, half a handful of black pepper, and two handfuls of fennel. Then add however much red pepper you want to make it sweet, medium or hot. Grind as much fat as you want. Mix in some fat to give it flavor, depending on how lean you like it. Add about a cup of cold water so the sausage steams in the casing and doesn't dry out. ​Don't grind the meat again. Some people grid their meat twice, but you end up with meat paste, not sausage. so don't grind it twice.
​Me: I won't, aunt.
​Her: Then put on the filling attachment and slide on the casing. Use some olive oil to keep the casing from drying out. Then you stuff your meat into the grinder and start filling the casing. Fill the casing evenly and roll it into coils. When you get about half a dozen rounds in the coil, twist it off. Then prick it with a toothpick here and there. That way the steam won't bust it open when you cook it...

​That's basically what we did. It came out great. Everybody left with packages of sausage, and it became a tradition that lasted for several years before time took friends in different directions. But it feels good knowing that if it came to war, I can make the gravy AND the sausage for the army. An army needs its cook more than its general!