Martin Scorsese’s mother teaches you how to make the “family sauce”
Cooking is all about heritage. Whether it’s the smell of our favourite childhood dish simmering in the pan or a recipe passed down the generations: food ties us to our past. Martin Scorsese understood this well. Though the director’s best-known movies deal with New York’s seedy underbelly, they also burst with warmth. Scorsese almost always includes a cooking scene to offset the brutality of his narratives. Take Goodfellas, for example, in which the famed mobster Henry Hill recalls how he and his gang made dinner in prison, leading to one of the most strangely heartwarming cooking scenes of all time.
So, why the obsession with food? In this snippet from the documentary Italianamerican, Scorsese offers the perfect answer: food tells us everything we need to know about a person; about where they came from and where they’re going. In 1974, the director decided to explore his parents’ attitudes, values and way of life alongside those of other first and second-generation Italian-Americans. Food, unsurprisingly, plays a very important role.
Scorsese grew up in New York’s Little Italy. His parents were both born there, too, but were of Sicilian heritage. Catherine Scorsese was born in 1912 to Domenica and Martin Cappa and grew up in the outer fringes of Manhattan in a three-room apartment shared with 14 people. Here, she explains that she only really learnt to cook after marrying Charles Scorsese in 1933. “When you first get married, you’re not really much of a cook. I watched my mother make sauce. I watched my mother-in-law. I got a lot from my mother-in-law. I got a lot from the family.”
At the oven, Catherine sets about preparing an Italian American classic: spaghetti and meatballs. The key is the sauce, she explains. Adding a little bit of this rich, velvety ragu (cooked on a low heat for as long as possible) to the meat keeps it soft and moist. “Not like some of the meatballs you eat sometimes,” she notes shadily. Good ingredients are also an absolute necessity. Scorsese’s mother would keep basil leaves from her sister’s garden for use in all her sauces, giving them that unique aroma.
If you want to make Catherine’s sauce, you’ll be pleased to hear that Martin was generous enough to share the recipe. First, “singe an onion and a pinch of garlic in oil. Throw in a piece of veal, a piece of beef, some pork sausages and a lamb neck bone. Add a basil leaf. When the meat is brown, take it out and put it on a plate. Put in a can of tomato paste and some water. Pass a can of whole tomatoes through a blender and pour it in. Let it boil. Add salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar. Let it cook for a while. Throw the meat back in. Cook for 1 hour. Now, make the meatball. Put a slice of bread without crust, 2 eggs and a drop of milk into a bowl of ground veal and beef. Add salt, pepper, some cheese and a few spoons of sauce. Mix it with your hands. Roll them up, throw them in. Let it cook for another hour.”
Happy saucing.
