Sunday supper: The American tradition that cuts across cultures by Salena Zito |
May 31, 2019 12:00 AM PITTSBURGH
Raymond Mikesell wanted to make Sunday supper, the kind he had growing up on the North Side of Pittsburgh that began with waking up early to the rich aroma of his mother’s sauce and ended with his siblings and cousins playing pick-up baseball or football in the backyard while the grown-ups sat on the porch with their Coleman coolers popping the tops off of Schmidt’s beers and solving the neighborhood’s problems. Large decorative bowls of steaming hot rigatoni, platters of greens and beans, meatballs, gravy, chunks of Parmesan cheese and crispy bread that melted in your mouth when you bit off a chunk would fill two tables: one for the adults and one for the kids.
It was loud, boisterous, and often chaotic. No faces were buried in an iPhone or GameBoy. Everyone talked and argued, and eventually had to loosen their belts. “I was aware even then that this was something special. Something I wanted to hold on to,” Mikesell said.
But as the elders died off and the family scattered when Western Pennsylvania’s economy collapsed in the '80s, Mikesell found that "something special" gone. And it wasn’t just his family. It was families across his old neighborhood, as well as the city and the state and beyond. And it wasn’t just Italian families either. It was all of the ethnic families that flooded the mid-Atlantic and the black families who migrated from the South in the late 19th century all for better lives.
They all had had similar family traditions: church in the morning, supper midafternoon, recovery for the rest of the day. Holding it together somehow became too difficult for the next generation of sons and daughters, yet their excuses seemed hollow: "It’s too hard," "We're too busy," "Nobody does that anymore." Yet Mikesell, the father of three children and owner of a Strip District cafe, found he was tired of making those same excuses and hearing them from other people, so he decided to bring back the Sunday supper.
“With all this stuff that's going on in the world and the breakdown of the family, I wanted to be part of something that brought that kind of traditional value back for people who either have lost their family to other parts of the country or to age, or to people who moved here and want that sense of belonging,” he said.
Like his grandmother and mother before him, cooking gives Mikesell an euphoric joy. “It is a true sense of purpose, I am creating and adding and making a mess and sharing with people the thing I do best: cook. There is something about people uniting over a heaping bowl of ricotta balls and pasta that is joyful, and I get to be part of it and in turn other people get to be part of it,” he said.
Several months ago, he decided to make a Sunday supper. He set a large table, cooked an overabundance of food (five courses), and said a little prayer hoping people would come. He did not use social media or an evite or any modern tools of communication. Like the old neighborhood he grew up where a story could pass from one porch to another faster than any text, he just told a handful of people and waited. He had no idea if anyone would come. “I set that table for 40 people, cooked for 80 …” he joked.
“By 5 p.m. I was glad I cooked for 80, because that is almost how many people came.”
His handful of friends and family had told their friends and extended family and they had told their friends and family. Within minutes, the large cavernous second floor of his cafe was filled with laughter and chatter, as strangers became family as they devoured trays of lasagna, rigatoni, meatballs, chicken thighs, and ricotta balls, all piled on top of long wooden table and served family style. Smartphones, iPads, and earbuds found themselves abandoned in purses, and conversations among strangers raised the noise level.
Mikesell choked up, tears filled his eyes as he watched what he, and everyone who came, had been missing for years: family, community. Francis Caiazza misses his family dinners terribly. “It’s difficult because my children are scattered all over the country, I have one grandson in Duquesne University here and the rest of my grandchildren and children are in New York, Ohio, and Florida,” said the retired federal magistrate judge.
“It starts with the family. When you don't have a family, you have no community. I see the effects, especially with younger kids, drug issues and what have you. It's sad, it's really sad, when you don’t have a family you don’t have community
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