Red Gravy

When I was very young, living in New Orleans, Sunday dinner at Big Nana’s was chicken cacciatore or pasta e fagioli or veal Bolognese. There was always an array of olive salad, stuffed artichokes, caponata, fava beans, and seasonal treats. My Nana and her eight sisters and brothers and many of their children, including my mother, chattered in Sicilian as we cooked and ate and cleaned up. Big Nana died when I was about four or five, and Sunday dinner, on a reduced basis, moved to Nana’s house.

“When I was very young, living in New Orleans, Sunday dinner at the home of Big Nana was chicken cacciatore or pasta e fagioli or veal Bolognese. There was always an array of olive salad, stuffed artichokes, caponata, fava beans, and seasonal treats. My Nana and her eight sisters and brothers and many of their children, including my mother (as a child here, c. 1921), chattered in Sicilian as we cooked and ate and cleaned up. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Elisabetta Lecce, my Nana, was born in Palermo, Sicily. She immigrated to New Orleans with her parents and several of her siblings at the turn of the twentieth century, part of the larger Sicilian migration to the city. She was eighteen years old when she stepped off the boat, an adult Sicilian woman, but she was young enough to adapt to her new home. The family cooked familiar food and lived within the community of Sicilians and Albanians in the city. She continued to speak Sicilian as she learned English. Big Papa and my Nana’s brothers were butchers, and they quickly had to learn the local foodways in order to survive. The family learned about red beans and rice and oyster soup, and when Nana moved to her own place after her mother died her Sunday dinner was less Sicilian and more New Orleans in menu and scope—more intimate and less raucous. Despite her adoption of many of the foodways of New Orleans, however, Nana drew the line at red gravy.

Red gravy, at least in our family’s parlance, is not Italian tomato sauce. Red gravy is the creolized version of tomato sauce that New Orleanians serve over spaghetti. Being Creole, it naturally starts with a roux and bears no relationship—beyond tomatoes—to Italian sauce. It is something different, something independent, something that has emerged as new.

Considering that Nana accepted other foods, it is curious that red gravy was the deviation that symbolized disloyalty and disdain. Had it not been served on spaghetti and then topped with cheese in clear imitation of Italian tomato sauce (with perhaps the implication that it was an improvement), red gravy could have been seen as a new dish, part of New Orleans cuisine. Like changes in language fought by purists, I was witness to the insinuation of Sicilian foodways into the cuisine of New Orleans. Today, these dishes exist on every Creole menu and food historians include these foods in the grammar of New Orleans dishes—muffuletta sandwiches, Italian sausage po’ boys, meatball po’ boys, stuffed artichokes, ices and snowballs, and red gravy.

My family was not alone in its scorn for red gravy. All self-respecting Sicilians disdained red gravy. It was a measure of connection to the heritage and culture of the old world and a hesitation to become fully committed to the culture of the new world in which they found themselves. They could embrace red beans and rice, a thing so foreign that it represented the new without giving up the old. But red gravy required an admission that the very culture itself had changed, not that they had merely incorporated the new.

This New World vegetable, the pomo d’oro, was introduced into Europe and thus Sicily in the sixteenth century. The people of southern Italy and Sicily adopted the vegetable in earnest and earlier than many other peoples of Europe, and this New World import became so important, almost iconic, to the cuisine that even today we identify tomato sauce with things Italian. The people of...