Lost in translation

NEWS

While locally 'gravy' often means a tomato-based pasta sauce, the word has sparked debate that its usage expands well beyond city limits.

By Amanda Snyder

Add Comment | Comments: 1 | Posted Oct. 8, 2009

Pasta chef Natale Zedde at Dante & Luigi's, 762 S. 10th St. cooks up some authentic Italian gravy, which contains meat and simmers for at least six hours (Staff Photo by Greg Bezanis).

Gravy and macaroni sounds delicious to many local Italian-Americans, but others may be confused hearing what they perceive as an unusual combination.

"Other people outside of South Philly, when you say gravy, they say, 'don't you mean sauce?,'" resident Linda Schmidt said.

Schmidt has called the spaghetti-topper "gravy" for as long as she can remember, as do all of her family and friends. The word seems to be local lingo, the 15th-and-Hicks-street resident said, but she wasn't really sure where it originated.

"I never really thought about it," she said.

However, fellow gravy club member Rosemarie Pigliacelli, of Broad Street and Oregon Avenue, said the word's use spans far beyond community borders.

"It really has nothing to do with Philly," she said. "When I had gone to Italy, they referred to [red sauce] as 'gravy.'"

Author Lorraine Ranalli went in search of the answer in her book "Gravy Wars: South Philly Foods, Feuds & Attytudes," which was released in February.

"That's one of the things I wanted to stir up with the book because it's fun," Ranalli, a Delaware County resident whose parents grew up in South Philly, said.

While a few Italian neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Chicago referred to tomato sauce as "gravy," she concluded, "it was largely a South Philly regional thing" that resulted from a language misunderstanding when Italians immigrated to America.

"In Italian, 'ragu' means 'gravy,' but it also means 'sauce,'" the author said. "Italians in Italy never intended to call tomato sauce gravy ... There was something lost in translation."

Generations of Italian-Americans soon reasoned gravy was a meat-based sauce while marinara lacked meat. However, an Italian told Ranalli marinara indicates the presence of seafood as "mare" means "sea" in Italian.

"You'll never hear that expression in the States," she said. "Most Italians think of marinara as a meatless gravy."

Opened since 1899, Dante & Luigi's, 762 S. 10th St., is the oldest Italian restaurant in the city and one of the oldest in the nation, owner Connie LaRussa said.

Not only is "Italian gravy" on the menu, but it's also listed right underneath "Sugo di Pasta" on its jar of homemade sauce that is sold to customers.

"We list ours as Italian gravy and we are actually the only ones down here with real Italian gravy," she said.

But marinara sauce is completely different from Italian gravy, LaRussa added.

"Italian gravy is the one that's slow-cooked all day long," she said. "It's meat-based, six to eight hours in the pot."

However, the scope of the term is not limited to just South Philly, as some restaurants outside of the borders refer to it as gravy, she said.

"I think it's an Italian thing," she said. "It is also a South Philly thing, but it's an Italian thing."

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