Is It Gravy or Sauce?

How can you tell the difference?  OK people let’s try to answer the age old question that occupies many a mind and has eluded a definitive answer.

I am not Italian but I spent my formidable years in the melting pot neighborhood of Ozone Park, Queens. If I went over to get one of my friends it was sure thing that his mom would say “come on in you’re so skinny have something to eat.”

They would lay out the meatballs and spaghetti the flavors abounded. A little sausage and meatball and pile of spaghetti covered in….sauce or gravy…Nine out of ten times they had a pot on the stove and could fill a plate in five minutes. From house to house it was different at Frankie’s it was gravy at Lenny’s it was sauce. Keeping this straight could always get you invited back.

Mrs. Leantonio called it gravy, Mrs. Poretto called it sauce. How the heck was I supposed remember all of this? I could never figure out why or dared to ask not wanting to appear like a gavone - that’s slang loosely translated means dipstick.So I went through my youth never getting to the bottom of it. Now it bugs me on a daily basis (not really).

I like to make sauce/gravy from scratch and have finagled a true handed-down-for-generation’s recipe from my best friend growing ups wife, MaryAnn. I keep it in a folder in my documents and have made it twice so far. The second time I made it I put a bit too much red pepper and it was too spicy so I will surely tune it down next time. I like to make a batch in the fall and freeze a few jars.

Being a pasta lover is a downfall; because of the carbs I can only indulge maybe twice a month. But when I do, look out, there is going to be some serious eating going on.  I grab a jar from the freezer let it sit in the refrigerator overnight and get it on the stove about 2 to 3 hours before dinner. I will make my meatballs and maybe some sausage. Then comes the metamorphose, its sauce until I throw in the meat then it transforms into gravy. I let the meat simmer in the gravy for a few hours and serve it piping hot over any pasta (linguine is my favorite), with a little garlic bread and grated Romano. As a non Italian I do pretty well and no one goes away from the table hungry.

The thing about it, it is all natural, I look for the cans of ingredients that are not loaded with chemicals something it is hard to do but I manage best I can.

So there you have it, I have solved this age old question. But I am sure to get some comments to dispute my findings. Most of us grew up thinking gravy was something you put on mashed potatoes or smothered on biscuits. But now you know so the next time you ask for a little more make sure you know if the meat was in the sauce it’s gravy if the sauce is stand alone it’s sauce.

PS: On a side note, the tomato is an American fruit (or vegetable here we go again). It went global in the 1500's.