OK... What do you call Tomato Sauce... "Sauce" or "Gravy" ???

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In Connecticut

many, many people call it gravy. And lasagna is served at all holiday meals--Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving...

They also call mozzarella cheese "mootz" and ricotta "rigut". And along the shoreline, the first letter of "pizza" is "A". (Apizza--pronounced uh-PEETZ)

I'm from the midwest, so I call the red stuff "sauce" even if I have picked up mootz and rigut in my speech. And I can't throw stones, because I use words like "hamloaf" and "goetta" that have no translation here. And yes, I say "pop" in reference to carbonated soft drinks.
 
Tomato sauce here. I have never heard anyone whom I know use any other label.

I think I use both "pasta" and "noodles". Pasta is probably the "default." But I might sometimes say "spaghetti noodles." I can't say for sure, but I think "noodles" might be the "standard" when I was quite young.

As for cheese, I almost never bother these days. Years back, when I was cooking more (and more of a snob), I liked getting parmesan and grating it. The choice of parmesan was possibly influenced by A) commonly called for in one cookbook I liked and B) easy to come by. (This was 20 years ago. I can't recall for sure, but I don't think the variety of cheese was as diverse in the average grocery store as it is now.)
 
My ex's family always referred to what they made as "sauce". it was generally light and cooked fairly quickly, 20-25 minutes. If meat was added, it was usually cooked separately and added to the sauce in the last 10 minutes of simmering.

"Gravy" referred to thick, heavy meat based sauces in which the meat did most of its cooking (simmered 2-3 hours) after having been seared/braised/browned beforehand. This was regarded as a 'southern' style of sauce and generally made for holidays or other special events when time allowed. It was not part of the region's regular cuisine.

'Pasta' was the word used, but more often the name for the specific type of pasta was used. IIRC, 'macaroni' referred to an American style pasta dish.

Cheese? Pecorino Romano is my favorite.

As to pronunciation differences one finds here, there are several general trends one finds in Italian. As one moves south in Italy...

1. the vowel at the end of the word tends to disappear.
2.hard 'c' picks up a voice if it's near the stressed vowel and becomes hard 'g'.

So #1 and #2 combine to make 'ricOtta -> 'rigOt'

I'd guess that the 'a' in 'a-peetz' is a leftover/semi Anglicized 'la' (the).

Italian has an amazing number of dialects, many of which are not mutually comprehensible. The dialects of 2 cities 100 miles apart can have major differences in both vocabulary and grammar. Incidentally 'Italian' as we think of it here, is actually a fairly new invention. It was designed by committee as a second dialect that all Italians would learn in school so everyone in the newly united Italy of the 1800's would (eventually) be able to talk to each other.

Jim
 
Well I grew up near New Haven and we were basically surrounded by Italian-American families. Never heard any of them refer to spaghetti sauce as gravy. But maybe they were deferring to the non-Italians. I don't know. We left CT when I was 11 years old, so my exposure to alternate word choices may have been age-limited. We moved to San Francisco where the main ethnic fare was Chinese (Cantonese).

 

 
 
Here in the Twin Cities we call it Pasta and Sauce:

While My red sauce could be technically a gravy: (I fry the meat and then deglaze the pot to release the fond and finish the sauce from there). I still call it pasta sauce.
Any red pasta sauce that does not involve the deglazing of a pan of meat drippings is NOT A GRAVY! To be a gravy it has to contain the drippings/fond from cooking meat.
WK78
 
I call it sauce, but my grandparents called it gravy. I grew up in Ohio (nobody said gravy there), but now live in South Philly where some of my grandparents grew up. It is still common to hear older people in my neighborhood speaking Italian, and if someone says they made gravy, it is assumed to be tomato sauce. I have noticed that a lot of Italians from nearby New Jersey will say gravy.

http://www.dangelobros.com/cookbooks.html
 
For me anything that is based off of fat thickened with flour/cornstarch is a gravy, anything else is a sauce, such as tomato sauce, pasta sauce.

My cheese of choice is Romano, I like it's sharp and salty taste.

Also for us all forms of pasta etc we call noodles. I'm assuming that is mostly from the Eastern European background, all my grandparents call everything noodles.
 
This all reminds of a time I went with some friends to an Italian restaurant in Monterey. I had arrived a bit late and wasn't really hungry. But I had heard the term "Pasta fazool" and wondered what it was, and asked if I could have some. I think someone asked if I wanted beans with it, which seemed weird to me, and I pictured some baked beans on the side, so I said  "no beans". Well, what came out was a bowl of limp macaroni swimming in nothing but plain tomato sauce, like you'd get out of a can. It was awful. I took one spoonful and not more. Years later I looked it up in Google and realized that Pasta Fazool is supposed to have beans in it, that meal in Monterey probably would have been a lot better had I said "yes" to the bean question. It's also possible it wasn't a very good restaurant.

 

LOL

 
 
You guys are making me 'homesick' for the food my ex's family cooked. They're from Abruzzo, which has a cuisine quite different from what most people think of as "Italian". Because of the geography (I assume) they seem have a little bit of everything edible but not much of any one thing. Result: There's a local recipe for damn near everything: deer, goat, lamb, quail, guinea hen, duck, goose, rabbit (very popular!), freshwater mussels, and everything that comes out of the Adriatic, including jellyfish. It's also unique (so I'm told) because it's one of the few areas that eat rice AND pasta. In general the cuisine seems to be heavier on vegetables (especially legumes) & eggs(!) and lighter on meat than other areas. Whole grain pasta is not unusual, although it seems to be regarded as old-fashioned peasant food.

Also interesting is that I'm told that much of the food that's regular fare in Abruzzo is regarded as 'Jewish' in other areas in Italy. That in itself is interesting as Judaism in Italy is a bit more complex than the Ashkenazic or Sephardic grouping(s) we think of in the U.S. (yes, I know I'm oversimplifying).

Another uncommon thing is the 'cooked wine' that is made because it is able to withstand the summer heat. It seems to be different from the 'vino cotto' I've read about and few Italian-Americans I've spoken with seem to have heard of it. No worries, I learned to make it from a guy who was regarded as one of the top wine makers in the village the family came from. Better yet, NOBODY now alive in the family knows how to do it...... only me <evil laugh>.

I don't miss my ex, but I really, really miss the food!

Jim
 
pasta fazool

IIRC, "pasta e fagioli" literally means "pasta with beans" so why would they offer it without? And plain tomato sauce? My aunt always makes it with chicken broth and I can't remember ever seeing it made with red sauce.

But, just as dialects differ from region to region, so do dishes!

WK, depending on what I'm doing or how I feel, I too sometimes brown meat then deglaze the fond with wine and add it to the pot of red. More often than not, though, if I'm using meat I've been putting it on the grill to sear it then cut it and put it (with the juices) in the pot.

Chuck
 
pasta e fagioli

Whatever it was, it was awful.

 

Even just plain pasta sautéed with garlic and olive oil, with some salt and ground pepper, would have been better.

 

The cook might have been Mexican with even less knowledge of the dish than I had.

 
 
What I recall from the Brooklyn corner of the five boroughs is that what you made on Sunday (with meatballs, sausage and braciole) was gravy. If you referred to any tomato based concoction as sauce, it was a quick cooked marinara or in the summer when we had bushels of fresh plum tomatoes my mother made "summer sauce" - no meat and very much like marinara but no oregano.

Pasta was called by whatever it's name was - spaghetti, linguine, fettucine, lasagne, ravioli, manicotti, mafalde (basically looked like thin lasagne) or fusilli (the long ones - not the short).

Macaroni was a generic term that was used as a catch all.

The use of the Americanized terms for mozzarella and ricotta were also heard throughout Connecticut - my father;s family was from Stamford and their Italian pronunciations were abysmal... Quite frankly so was their cooking. Very heavy American interpretations of Italian items and Sunday gravy you could spread with a paint trowel.

Thank God my mother's family was directly from Naples...through New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast and settled in Brooklyn. Kind of like the people pictured in the Anna Magnani movie "The Rose Tattoo" but on speed...
 
OK... I have a question....

 

 

For those of you that refer to tomato based pasta / spaghetti / noodle sauce as "gravy"...

 

Then what do you call "actual" gravy that is poured over meat, mashed potatoes, french fries, etc??

 

Kevin

 

BTW.... Fred (Blackstone) that House of Gravy video was VERY funny!  Thanks for sharing it!

revvinkevin-2015041010333008375_1.jpg
 
I"ve read through the thread and am in line. Only time I heard it referred to as gravy was from Italian heritage family from NYC/NJ in 1986. Everyone else has called it not being gravy. Pasta sauce and genereically referred to as pasta until the need for a specified type of pasta.
 
Kevin - That other gravy was universally referred to as "brown gravy". So, the conversation would go something like this:

Me: "Ma, what are having for supper? (note I didn't call it "dinner")
Ma: "Roast beef (or loin of pork, or turkey or chicken, etc...), mashed potatoes, peas and "brown gravy"

So whatever the meat, it was served with "brown gravy"... regardless of the shade of brown.
 

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