Sunday Dinner Part II. Mom’s Ravioli Made Sunday Dinner Special

Yep, it's all about ravioli

How can ravioli not be one of your favorite dishes? ( Don’t you just love a story that starts with a negative/positive? Or is it a positive/negative?) Especially if it is homemade as my mother’s oh those many years ago.

Of late, we have taken to buying ravioli as we no longer make it at home. We haven’t attempted it since Diane gave up on trying to replicate my Mom’s recipe. More about that later. So what do we do?

I’ve found two commercial raviolis that work.

One is frozen from Venda, and it is good. Since I can’t get to Federal Hill to buy Venda’s freshly made, I have to settle for the frozen that I find at local markets.

Photo courtesy of Venda

A traditionalist, I like the ricotta filled. We also buy fresh ravioli made by the pastaio at Prica Farina in nearby Warren, Rhode Island. We’ve had every pasta they make, but the herbed ravioli is among my favorites. I’ve become more adventuresome in my later years.

So though I consider it ‘second’ best, nonetheless, these ravioli are excellent. Why second best? Because they just don’t match my mother’s. For that matter, does any pasta come close to the homemade you had when you were a kid? Made from scratch with fresh ingredients perfectly proportioned with the familiar shape, delicate, and tender. And under your roof with family. I doubt it.

But this story is about Mom’s ravioli. I’m calling this piece Sunday Dinner Part II because my mother picked up the tradition of Sunday dinners when my grandparents passed.

In my book “What Ever Happened to Sunday Dinner?”

What Ever Happened to Sunday Dinner?

I write of the wonderful gatherings every Sunday at my grandparents’ tenement, where they served their abbondanza. I realize it now, but at the time, I did not appreciate how important those Sundays were for the enrichment of our family. I took them for granted.

After my grandparents died, Sunday dinners diminished a bit. Families multiplied, moved away, and had other obligations. Peter and I pursued our educations, married, had children, and started our careers.

But along the way, my mother kept the tradition of Sunday dinner and family gatherings alive, introducing our children to the wonderful experiences of our youth. Mom’s homemade ravioli, which our children called sliders, were our favorite and the centerpiece of most Sunday meals. Her hand-softened potato croquettes made with more love were added value, found nowhere else.

Making the ravioli was hard work. She started the day before by commanding the dough, firmly kneading a mound of flour and water with her strong hands. Pasta machine? Are you kidding?

Early the next morning, after the dough had risen like the dawn, she rolled it out, cut it into wide strips, laid on dollops of enriched ricotta, topped it with another wide strip, sealed the long edges, and finally cut them with a fluted pastry wheel, and tapped the edges for good measure. They were huge, quite a bit larger than the commercial ones we see today. When she finished, she sprinkled them lightly with cornmeal and laid them on white sheets on the bed in a spare bedroom. No recipe. No notes. Just years of experience and, I guess, some teaching by her mother.

Everyone knew the answer to “What can I do to help, Anna?”

Waving her arm backward without looking, she replied, “Nothing, nothing. Get off, Get off (her favorite phrase). It’s done.” When my wife, Diane, and sister-in-law, Anita, tried to learn the recipe and her methods, it was impossible. There were neither words nor script for that special technique.

On Sundays when the ravioli were featured, Dad brought the water to a boil. Cradling them like ingots of gold on a wooden board, he displayed them as he paraded from the bedroom to the kitchen stove. With a large spoon, he nudged them into the water one at a time, never breaking one. Too precious.

The Ravioli Team

Mom’s ravioli married beautifully to the perfect toothsome gravy spilled over the ‘ravs;’ not too sweet or heavy. The ravioli, though slightly al dente, were so soft, creamy, and tender that they slid down; hence the name sliders. The kids counted how many they ate (double figures, too many) as if they were in a contest. No, Mom never ran out. There was always enough to take home.

“Here, here, take some home. Take some meatballs. Take it. Take it.”

The call of the ravioli was powerful on those Sundays, but not as much as the call of family. Mom returned us to those special Sunday dinners with her parents and helped us realize how important family times are.

It's fair to say that I think of her ravioli often.

They were the symbols of our family Sundays.