Sunday Dinner With My In-Laws

Ah, it's an autumn Sunday in New England. And because it's a Sunday in autumn in New England, my mind turns to recollect how many of my Sundays here in the past were spent  having dinner with my mother and father in-law, Marie and Ed.

I would say that the vast majority of Sunday evenings for approximately eighteen years were spent in this manner. Not just fall, but every season. It was the rare Sunday that was missed. In the earlier days, I attempted to reciprocate and have the occasional dinner at our house instead of theirs, but the first disastrous attempt of mine at making something "different" involved a beef stew with raisins that traumatized all the participants, resulting in my mother-in-law bringing a back-up lasagna to our next turn at hosting so that Ed would be assured of having something edible. I wasn't offended, because I wasn't that great of a cook at that time, something I cheerfully acknowledged, so without any further discussion the four of us tacitly agreed that future Sundays would be held at their house unless it was leveled by a natural disaster, in which case I could fill in.

Marie was a simple cook but a great cook. She never used or referred to a recipe that I ever saw and she pretty much kept to the same repertoire for the Sunday soirees. Which is not a complaint; familiarity in this case lead to devotion rather than contempt.

We'd usually get there around sixish. Often Ed was attired in a Mr. Rogers sort of sweater vest and brandished a vintage cocktail shaker (although not vintage when purchased) with cocktail glasses and recipes etched on its surface.

"Would you care for a Manhattan, Valerie?" was the ritual opening. I loved that he always asked, as though the response was ever in doubt. Ed and I (and sometimes my brother-in-law Ethan and his father Bob) were expert at dispatching the contents of the shaker. Then after cocktails, we moved along to the main event - dinner.

As in most New England homes with some Italian genes in the pool, family dinners always involved pasta, homemade red sauce (known as "gravy") and whatever embellishments the hosts cared to provide - sausage and peppers, meatballs, eggplant, etc. Marie usually brought out most if not all of the above, accompanied by homemade pizza (as a side!), along with chicken soup or cabbage and bean soup and possibly oven-baked chicken with potatoes and onions. And stuffed artichokes or mushrooms. Or stuffed peppers. Abbondanza! And it was all delicious. Seriously, how could I compete with that? Why would I want to?

And then, at almost every dinner would occur the meatball debate. Ed liked his meatballs cooked, but not cooked in the red sauce. Marie preferred hers cooked in the sauce. I fell on the Ed side of the saucepan for the most part although my husband liked both. So on the table would be two bowls of meatballs, one sauced and one not. And the advantages of both methods were discussed. Every. Single. Sunday. This was not even a joke. This groundhog day routine was a set piece and ritual and done completely unironically by my in-laws as though they had never once had this discussion before. In acting, great professionals of the theater struggle to bring this "first time" freshness to a long-run show. Marie and Ed could have tutored Olivier and Gielgud in their technique. I always waited breathlessly for the moment when Marie would offer Ed the bowl of sauced meatballs, the signal for the games to begin.

No dessert to speak of, I mean really, how could there be? Except around Easter time, Marie would make a ricotta and rice pie that her mother made which is an old Neapolitan dish. Which no one liked. Except Marie. But she made it every year and every year was completely astonished when she had no takers. Which was fine, because she loved it, even if she was surrounded by Nordic and Celtic cretins with tin palates. She called the cheese in this pie "Rigoth" (long O sound, rhymes with "both") which is I guess how Neapolitans say ricotta. One day a light bulb went on and I said "oh, you mean RiCOTTA!" in the most nasally, twangy Americanese it is possible to say that sentence, and she replied, "Yes, Rigoth."

After dinner we would waddle (the only way one can walk after a Marie repast) into the small living room and watch Sunday evening network American fare, usually 60 Minutes followed by Murder She Wrote. Being New England small town yokels, we loved to laugh at Murder She Wrote and its depictions of New England small town yokels.

Sadly, the dinners stopped when we moved away and out of state for a number of years and Marie and Ed are no longer with us. But we live in their old house now and very frequently make spaghetti and meatballs and put half the meatballs in the sauce and the other half out and then debate the merits of each.