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My mother calls it gravy. Yes, I come from a “gravy” family.  I cannot go along with this tradition. It is sauce to me. Gravy is pan drippings or stock thickened with a roux. Sauces are made from a wide variety of ingredients, fruits being one option. Sorry, Mom.

Though we disagree on the name, we agree about everything else on the subject of tomato sauce. When I was learning how to cook this was one of the first things I wanted to learn how to make. I, and everyone else who ever tasted it, always admired my Mom’s, really the family’s, amazing tomato sauce. What a nice surprise it was, to learn how easy it is to make. The secret is mainly in the technique, which is mostly about patience, and quality of the ingredients, rather than quantity of them. The simplicity is partly what makes it so special. It’s all about enhancing the flavour of the tomatoes by complimenting them with ingredients that support, and do not overpower their flavour, and simmering the sauce for a long long time. Yes, we are those people who believe that a worthy sauce has to age into its full potential. There are those who think that a wonderful sauce can be made within an hour. This has never been proven to me. A quick sauce in my opinion is simply flat.  Not only should a sauce be simmered for hours, but it should be chilled and allowed to sit in the refrigerator for at least 8 hours, then be brought back up to heat before serving. It is only after this rest that all of the flavours truly combine. So when you decide to make this sauce, start the day before you intend to eat it.

I am not really sure how many servings this recipe makes. How do you measure a serving of sauce? Some people like a lot and some people only use a little. I like a lot of sauce and I suppose I could serve up around 10 good sized plates of pasta with a generous amount of sauce on it with this recipe, but this is only a rough guess. Even if you are cooking only for yourself or a couple of people, this is the smallest batch of sauce you should ever make. It freezes well and has lots of uses so even if you do not think you can eat it all within a couple of days you can always freeze it for later.

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The next recipe I want to post is for my Italian tomato sauce, but for that recipe, you need these meatballs. To make these meatballs, you need to make tomato sauce, so this meatball recipe and this tomato sauce recipe go hand in hand. You could of course make these meatballs with a different sauce, or no sauce, or make the tomato sauce with different meatballs or no meatballs, but that would be just so wrong! I know there is no one right way to make things, but there are certainly wrong ways, and this recipe is one of the sacred ones in my repertoire. If too much is changed about either one, they cease to be MY sauce and MY meatballs, and one of the laws about my sauce and my meatballs is that they are made together. The meatballs are enhanced by the sauce and the sauce is enhanced by the meatballs. One without the other is only half a completed recipe.

This meatball recipe is an adaption of my mother’s meatballs recipe, which she learned from my grandmother. I’m not sure just how far back it goes but it is one of those classic beloved family recipes that have changed slightly with each generation. I know, I know, everyone’s family recipe for meatballs and sauce is the best, so who am I to claim that this is really any better than anyone else’s? I am not claiming that at all except I will say that, to my palate, this is the final word in Italian meatballs and tomato sauce. Other recipes can be delicious, but when I taste this recipe, I taste home. As I have mentioned, I have changed my mother’s recipe slightly, but she approves of my changes and absolutely loves my version. Italian-American cuisine just seems to come naturally to the cooks in my family. We have only a little Italian blood, but we have a lot of Italian American cultural influence in our family history. My grandmother had a successful Italian restaurant in Florida for a number of years which featured only her own recipes and she did a lot of the cooking, so I think that our cooking style is something to be proud of.

This recipe will yield anywhere from 10 to 20 meatballs depending on how large you like them, or about 6 servings. If you desire left overs, or are cooking for more than three people I recommend doubling this recipe.

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It’s a wildly popular item to be served at Italian-American wedding receptions, especially in the North Eastern United States, and most specifically the Pennsylvania/ New Jersey areas. It is most popular in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania where it is almost always fed to a new bride and groom and said to be “energy fortification” to help them through their first night together. How romantic.  So that’s why it is called Italian wedding soup, right? Well, no. It is sort of the other way around and became a wedding tradition seemingly because of its name. The name is a mistranslation of “minestra maritata” (married soup). The Italians use this term to describe how well vegetables and grains go together in a soup. It’s a good “marriage” of ingredients. In some parts of Italy the traditional soup contains meat and in others it does not. There are no hard rules as to what greens are used and the grains can take the form of a small pasta, long noodles or even beans. The meat in the soup also varies, sometimes being pork, chicken, beef, or more recently meatballs. So Italian wedding soup can take on many different forms, and people from different traditions or who have lived in different parts of the country have different concepts of what Italian wedding soup should be.

This recipe will be dealing with the North Eastern United States concept of the soup. There are many variables and I will be pointing some of them out, but this recipe makes an amazing Italian wedding soup any Italian-American cook would be proud to serve.

Using a few premade ingredients this soup can be prepared in about 20 minutes, or if you want to make it completely from scratch it can take many hours. The choice is yours. It merely depends on the time you are able or willing to spend on making it. This recipe makes approximately 2 liters ( around 6 servings) worth of soup.