Tag Archives: italian family

Salad After Dinner

Text:

“We always ate salad after dinner”

Context:

My dad grew up in a large Italian-American family in New Jersey. Every night they would have family dinner. They would eat different meals depending on the day of the week: spaghetti on Sunday, leftovers on Wednesday, etc. However, one thing remained the same: when salad was eaten. Salad was always eaten after the main course. At school, my father would sometimes tell other kids that his family would eat salad after the meal, and the kids would make fun of him, not understanding why his family did that.

Analysis:

Eating salad after the main course is a very Italian tradition. It’s a ritual because it is a repeated and patterned act that followed every family dinner my father had. My dad believes they ate salad after dinner in order to promote digestive health with the fiber. After having spent time in Italy, I agree with my dad’s belief and add onto it saying that salad is eaten after dinner in order to not be full for the main course. The pasta, fish, or meat dishes in an Italian meal are considered the highlight. It is considered almost disrespectful to not finish the main course, so eating salad after the main course ensures that you remain hungry for the meal and don’t fill up on salad. With food being so innate and important in Italian culture, it makes sense that rituals such as this one exist surrounding dinner time.

Christmas Raviolis

Text: 

“At Christmas, we make homemade raviolis. When I was growing up, my grandmother [made homemade raviolis] most of the time, and then when you kids were younger, Nonni (the informant’s mother) did it a number of years, and now we do it.”

Minor Genre: 

Holiday Ritual; Food Traditions

Context: 

“My dad has a funny story about the first time he had dinner with my mom’s Italian family. In the Italian meals, they would serve raviolis almost as an appetizer. My dad filled up on the raviolis and then there were still like four more courses of dinner to come.

“I never made [the raviolis], I just ate them. My grandmother made them and I didn’t really pitch in as a kid. It wasn’t until Nonni started making them with you kids that I helped. We would have raviolis throughout the year but really the ritual of making them was saved for Christmas.”

Analysis:

I have memories of making raviolis with my grandmother, Nonni, every Christmas growing up. It was a process that involved the whole family: we first made the pasta dough using an old recipe from the informant’s grandmother (my great-grandmother); then we rolled out the pasta into thin strips using a pasta-roller attachment to the kitchen table; then we used ravioli dishes to place the dough, add in the filling, and press the food into ravioli shapes.

Ravioli originated in Italy and is a type of pasta dish containing filling typically composed of meat or cheese. Nonni’s side of the family immigrated from Italy from the regions of Tuscany and Campania. Although the filling of our family’s ravioli is likely an Americanized version of the Italian original, we reference an old hand-written recipe for the pasta that could reasonably be believed to have been brought over by Nonni’s Italian ancestors.

The ritual of making raviolis each Christmas is a way to honor our family’s Italian heritage while simultaneously engaging in a community-building activity that will ultimately be enjoyed by every member of the family at dinner.