I grew up Italian. And Irish. Most of the food we ate was American, except during the holidays. It was… what do you think? Italian, of course!
The truth is my mom was just an ok cook. We never went hungry and the food was down the middle of the fairway, as they say. Dad was a classic meat and potatoes man. He tolerated pasta at holidays, but don’t bother with rice or any other carb the rest of the week. Just potatoes, cooked in all ways possible, though I think there are only four of them. Which reminds me of one of my early golf trips to Ireland with a bunch of men – in my 40s. We played and then were having drinks and food afterward at the golf course restaurant and bar. The server brought out sides of fried potatoes and roasted potatoes. I asked if they had any other vegetables and he said “oh sure I’ll bring them right out.” He brought out a bowl of mashed potatoes with a tab of butter on it. Clearly, the joke was on me.
The Christmas Eve tradition in my family was all non-cooked food. Today we would celebrate it as charcuterie and all that. What I remember most was a cheese log covered in ground-up nuts. Walnuts, I think the were. I think I can speak for my sisters – it was an unsatisfactory dinner, to be polite about it. Practically speaking, mom cooked all day on Christmas Eve, so those ‘night before’ dinners had to be easy on her. On Christmas Eve, she made the gravy (red sauce with a variety of meats) because everyone knows, the sauce is always best the next day. She also made the pasta dough for the Christmas raviolis, which were assembled on the dining room table, after a giant cheese cloth had been put down. She would roll out the dough and dad would lay strips of it on the table, then mark the squares for the Ravs.
First down was the ricotta, followed by half a teaspoon of a parsley and olive oil mix, a sprinkle of Parmigiana Reggiano and lastly a small slice of fresh mozzarella. Dad would then cut them and we were taught how to tuck them together into individual raviolis with sealed edges. The sauce has fresh Italian sausage that my father had ground together the day before, and we all stuffed the meat into the casings. The sausages were lightly browned in the oven and then dropped in the gravy. Then there was the braciola, or a rolled meat dish pronounced – at least in our family, braaahzzyal, which is popular in Southern Italy’s Puglia region, among others. My parents made it with a top or bottom round beef roast, pounded flat so it could be rolled up, after it was stuffed with a mixture of bread crumbs, olive oil, garlic, fresh basil, a little prosciutto and pecorino cheese. And red pepper flakes with a little salt. Then it was rolled, tied together with strings, browned on the stovetop in a skillet with olive oil, then dropped in the gravy to slow cook for about four hours. When it was sliced and served, dripping in tomato sauce, it was fork tender. If I were to make this dish today, and something tells me I will, I will use truffle salt instead of regular salt.
I don’t remember any of the side dishes that were served with the raviolis, gravy and a nice slice of braciola, but there was probably a bowl of steamed broccoli on the table. We ate a lot of broccoli!
Once I left the nest, I kept the family tradition for awhile before it faded. My very first Christmas away from home, however, was in Aspen, and I made that dinner for my roommates and our friends. That was a magical night. After cleaning up the kitchen, we took our cross-country skis up to the old mining town of Ashcroft, which is 11 miles up Castle Creek Road. It was a full moon night and about 8 degrees below zero, without a whiff of wind. We skied out into the meadow when a nearby elk began to bugle. We stopped and listened, just smiling at each other, then someone pulled out a flask and we each drank from it.
I brought the tradition back once my daughter was born. I wanted her to know a little bit about growing up Italian. On Christmas Eve and instead of ravioli, we would make pasta together and use a machine I still have to cut fettuccini noodles, then hang them all around the house on shirt hangers to lightly dry the day before we cooked the pasta. We made the gravy the day before, just like mom did, but I bought the sausage. And made the braciola.
Fast forward to the new tradition, which is to get together as a family for Christmas lunch (a few days before Christmas)– dunch, really, even though we are no longer married. But our daughter is still our daughter, all of us love pizza, so I made pizza!
I made pizza a couple weeks earlier for some new friends. It was the first time in over four years since I made pizza dough (post-divorce, and not enough people to cook for—at least to trouble with homemade pizza) and while the toppings were delicious, I was rusty with the dough. It lacked the elasticity pizza dough should have, likely from either too much flour or not enough water. This batch of pizza dough was perfect! I made sure to use more water, and to the point that it was almost too hard to handle once I pulled it from the mixer. That early-phase stickiness is exactly what was needed to create elasticity in the dough.
We like our pizza with thin crusts, baked almost to the point (but not quite!) that the bottom is like a cracker, then loaded with ingredients on the top – and a bit “wet,” meaning no shortage of sauce. And not too much cheese!
With respect to the vegetarian in the family (our daughter), the first pizza was a classic margherita, with freshly sautéed garlic in olive oil, before the (vegetarian) tomato sauce was added. Instead of fresh basil, I hit the pizza pretty good with dried parsley and Herbes de Provence before putting on a light coat of parmesan and a light coat of mozzarella. That’s it.
The second pizza had a white truffle and tomato sauce base, with freshly steamed fennel cut up into small pieces, cherry tomatoes (halved) sliced black olives and both cheeses. We shared the first two pizzas. The third pizza was for my daughter. The tomato sauce had a little pesto as well as black truffle sauce, mostly feta cheese and a light topping of mozzarella cheese, with lots of black olives. The fourth pizza – the one pictured in this post, was shared by my ex and I. It had basic red sauce, cut up bell (green) pepper, a few of the sliced cherry tomatoes and a very generous portion of fried Italian sausage, broken up into pieces, and black olives. Then topped with both cheeses.
We drank a couple bottles of Chateauneuf du Pape, Domaine du Vieux Telegraphe, that I just got from Kermit Lynch. It was a bit young — a 2020, but I decanted it for a couple hours and paired more-than-well with the homemade pizza. The wine will no doubt improve with age, which is an appropriate metaphor to aspire to with what remains of our lives.