Martha shares listeners’ responses to an earlier minicast about the Italian-American expression macaroni and gravy. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Listener Macaroni and Gravy”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
If you listen to the broadcast version of our show on your local public radio station, then you may not be aware that we have a lot of special online-only web content.
In fact, every week we post a mini-podcast of about five minutes or less.
Recently, I did one on macaroni and gravy. You remember that one, Grant?
I do. We got a lot of email about that.
We did. We were responding to an email from a listener who said she grew up eating macaroni and gravy, meaning macaroni and marinara sauce.
And her Italian-born grandmother always called it macaroni and gravy.
And it turns out that there’s this raging, friendly debate in the Italian-American community about whether that red sauce should be called gravy or sauce.
Debbie wrote, I’m a Cajun-born New Orleanian, and everything I ate was with brown gravy made with a roux.
But if we had Italian night, it would be macaroni and red gravy.
That surprised me that somebody in New Orleans would be eating macaroni and red gravy.
And then we got a really nice posting on our discussion forum from Nana Lee.
She writes, when I started dating the man who would become my husband, his Italian grandmother from Salerno near Naples invited me to dinner at her house for macaroons and gravy.
I was a shy young girl of Irish-German descent who grew up on meat, taters, and two veggies for dinner, so I was dumbstruck at her invitation.
I politely accepted, wondering why on earth Grandma would prepare such a weird dinner.
To my delight, she had made spaghetti and meatballs.
It was a terrific dinner, and over time she taught me to make everything from gravy, northern Italian style, to broccoli rabe, to beans and greens, to gnocchi.
It just goes to show you never know what you’re going to get when you order gravy.
I like the fact that she chose Nona Lee for her username on our discussion forums because Nona is grandmother in Italian.
Yeah, I thought that was really sweet, too.
Well, if you’d like to comment on a show, you can go to our website.
That’s waywordradio.org.
Or send us an email.
That address is words@waywordradio.org.
Or call us 1-877-929-9673.
