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Health & Fitness

Growing Up Italian

You knew what you were going to eat when, and God forbid if you made plans for Sunday morning.

 

Some of the fondest memories I have of my life was when I was a young kid growing up at the Jersey Shore. My dad was from Long Branch by way of Jersey City, and my mom’s family had always been around here, coming to the shore before World War II -- although a large contingency of them still remained in Newark.

My parents got all their traits and habits from growing up in Italian households, especially my dad. His mother, whom we affectionately called “Big Grandma”, was born and raised near Catanzaro, in the region of Calabria, and came over to America when she was a young girl. So at a young age, my dad was indoctrinated into the Italian way of life, and he carried that with him into adult life.

Every Thursday and Sunday was spaghetti day, no matter what. On Sundays, “dinner” was spaghetti around 2PM, not 5 or 6. When normal dinner time rolled, we just didn’t feel hungry, so we waited until around 7 or so and made ourselves sandwiches.

Friday was pizza night. I remember going with my mother to Baldanza’s Bakery every Friday afternoon to pick up two one-pound bags of pizza dough that was made fresh daily. To save my mother time, homemade pizza eventually gave way to pizza from Rex’s on South Broadway, which was owned and operated by my uncle, Freddie Tarantola.

The sauce to make the pizza and pour on the spaghetti was another story. Every year in the fall, Big Grandma invited everyone over to her house to help her make homemade sauce. It was a ritual with her. She spent hours in her basement kitchen, boiling bushels of tomatoes up before putting them through the electric strainer that separated the skin from the “meat” of the tomato. It smelled heavenly.

Big Grandpa would get a bunch of mason jars from work, and Big Grandma poured the strained tomatoes into each one. Hundreds of jars were filled with the sauce – enough for an entire year for my grandparents, my family, and my uncle’s family. The families each got about 100 jars, and we stored ours in the basement, ready for use. My brothers and I helped by putting a leaf of basil in each Mason jar prior to the finished sauce being poured in.

Dinner every night (except for Sunday) was always around 5:30 or so. If any of us kids were playing around the neighborhood with our friends, my dad would walk out the front door and whistle about two or three times until we all made it home. The whistle saved a lot of wear and tear on my dad’s vocal chords.

Religion was another part of the story. My two younger brothers and I were baptized about a month or so after we were born – quickly, so that we wouldn’t wind up in “limbo” in case anything happened to us. Every Sunday, our family attended 9:00 Mass. As the kids got older, it became apparent that it was getting tougher for all of us to rouse ourselves in time for Sunday morning mass, so instead, we switched to Saturday late afternoons at 5PM.

As Italian as our family is, to this day, I still wonder how I ever got my first name.

(You can also follow Kevin Cieri’s blog on his Facebook page, “Jersey Shore Retro” as well as on Twitter [@jsretro]).

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