Bada-Bing, Bada-Bunny
Boston Outsider / Humor
I am an American of Italian ancestry, and I know that many of my co-ethnics were not thrilled with the way our tribe was portrayed on “The Sopranos.” But there were times when the show raised important questions, such as in the episode in which Paulie the capo and Silvio the consigliere argue as to whether the substance poured over pasta should be called “sauce” or “gravy.” It was a scene that hit home.
“Jimmy, you stupid fuck,” a dear friend once enlightened me. “Don’t call it sauce. If it’s got meat in it, it’s gravy”
Yes, meat is important in Italo-American culture. When I was growing up, no Fourth of July cookout at our house was complete without Italian sausages (hot and sweet) to show those burgers and hot dogs who was boss. Our fridge was always stocked with fine cold cuts. Once, when I was caught with a piece of genoa salami on a meatless Friday, I claimed that it was for my grandmother’s cat, and my mother countered by saying that the cat was a Third Order Carmelite, bound by vows to abstain from meat on both Fridays and Wednesdays.
As I grew up, I learned where different cuts of meat originated. Ham came from pigs. Roast beef came from the good part of a cow, and tripe came from its stomach. (Although if you’ve tried to chew tripe, you may think that it comes from the Firestone Tire plant in Akron.) And the summer after second grade, I found out that anything that lives and breathes could end up as a meal.
It was that summer that I spent a lot of time with my friend Angelo “Angie” Conigliaro, whose family kept a rabbit hatch containing about twenty of the little lagomorphs. One rabbit had distinct markings, a white face with a black circle around his eye, and I named him Petey, because he resembled the dog of the same name in “The Little Rascals” shorts. On one visit I noticed that Petey wasn’t in his cage, and I asked where he was.
“We ate him on Sunday,” Angie answered matter-of-factly, “in red sauce, over polenta.”
My family didn’t eat bunnies, so I was aghast at the thought of Petey being devoured. For weeks later, I would ask, “This isn’t rabbit, is it?” when I was served meat. And I began to worry about safety of the Easter Bunny, until a wise, old uncle told me that, “The Easter Bunny can’t be killed. He’s like Frankenstein. Everybody knows that”
I was relieved. But all these years later, I wonder about something. If Petey was the meat in that “red sauce,” shouldn’t it have been called red gravy?
