Red Pasta Sauce is Sometimes Called “Gravy”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Melissa Barkell from Grand Prairie, Texas, which is in Dallas County.

Yeah. Hey, Melissa, what’s going on?

I’m calling because I come from a New Jersey Neapolitan family.

And recently in a forum I went in on Facebook, the question came up of the use of gravy to refer to pasta sauce.

So a Neapolitan family from Napoli in Italy. Specifically, Cazerta is where my family is from, but that’s part of Napoli, yes.

Okay.

And gravy for red sauce?

For red sauce.

My understanding growing up was that it was only red sauce that had meat in it. So like marinara would be marinara, but tomato gravy has meat in it, usually meatballs or sometimes pancetta or prosciutto.

Bethany is called a New Jersey thing also. We leave off the final syllable of a bunch of words.

Neapolitan Italian is nothing like proper Italian. And then when you add Italian-American to it, it becomes a whole other thing.

And Melissa, was this discussion about gravy, was it by any chance heated?

It was pretty civil considering it was a Facebook forum and you know how people are on the net. And it was all women, which I think made a difference.

But yes, the actual Italians and the Italian-Americans were getting into it.

Well, that’s not surprising, is it, Grant?

No, it’s not surprising at all. This has come up before.

We last talked about this on the show, what, more than 10 years ago, I think, Martha. And I’ve seen this pop up again and again, even on television and, of course, on the Internet.

And you’re so right. People get heated about this.

It’s not a surprise that it’s a Neapolitan family. And I wouldn’t have been surprised if you said you were Sicilian either, because the Sicilian Americans also do the same thing.

They tend to call the red sauce gravy. And the why is important. I think you zeroed in on it.

It’s because the dialect that you speak has this particular feature where the word for sauce in the local language can be translated as either sauce or gravy into English.

And so when they came over, that’s what they chose. Sometimes they chose to translate it as sauce and sometimes they chose to translate it as gravy.

And it isn’t only the Italian-Americans around the New York City metropolitan area, because it’s New Jersey and Connecticut and New York where they do this, but also in New Orleans.

And it’s one of the local pride things there as well. They often call red sauce gravy.

And again, you’ve got something else really important there. Many people say without meat, it’s tomato sauce, and with meat, it’s gravy. So there is a distinction there.

There’s a really interesting line in Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Food Encyclopedia. He says, or the book says, basically a sauce and a gravy are the same thing.

A sauce is, to my ears, simply a more sophisticated and better sounding word than gravy, although he does go on to talk about using thickeners in gravies and that gravies would not be as refined as sauces.

But I think that’s a really important point. Sometimes it is really just a different choice in words rather than a different choice in ingredients or a different choice in what constitutes the food that we’re eating.

Oh, interesting. I had no idea about New Orleans. That’s interesting.

Yeah, right. Well, it’s also because, well, New Orleans had a long tradition of Italian immigration.

There was one point where the French Quarter in New Orleans was 80% Sicilian. And as a matter of fact, they called it Little Palermo.

Oh, that’s fantastic. Gravy is used to mean red sauce in the 1990 movie Goodfellas.

And you’ll find it used that way in, believe it or not, the Sopranos family cookbook. Like, who knew that that existed?

But also in The Sopranos, the television show about an Italian-American mobster family from New Jersey. And there’s a moment where a bunch of the guys go to Italy, and Pauly, one of the mobsters, orders gravy with macaroni in this real nice Italian restaurant.

And he explains that he means red sauce. And one of the Italian guys that they’re with in this nice restaurant turns to another one and says in Italian, and you thought the Germans were classless.

And making fun of the Americans, the Italian Americans, for asking for red sauce. Because it’s considered a low class because these were poor country people who came to the United States and did well for themselves and then came back thinking, oh, I’m Italian, only to find out they’re a different kind of Italian.

My cousins had that happen when they went back to visit old relatives. They were like, oh, these are our American cousins.

Yeah.

And it was very jarring for them.

I bet it is. Anyway, yeah, so red sauce called gravy is a real interesting thing.

I love how it plugs into these immigrant roots and these paths that people took where, I mean, we’re talking about a time in American history where Italy was undergoing these upheavals of conflict and strife and poverty and even starvation.

And people were leaving by shiploads to come to the new world and strike out for themselves. And they brought some of home with them.

And some of that was recipes and the ways of making food and the language that came with it. And here it is in your mouth.

Here these words are. Here you’re speaking it. I love it. History right there in your mouth, Melissa.

That’s a great expression. I love it.

Well, thank you for talking with me about it.

Oh, yeah. We were delighted to talk to you, Melissa. Call us again sometime, all right?

I would love to. Thank you.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye.

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