“Just checking: anyone coming down for lunch?”, my mom will text our family group chat on Sundays. Since we have all now congregated into what we lovingly call ‘the compound’—a triplex in Montreal’s east end—she always asks who is interested in a bowl of bolognese at around 1 p.m. The upstairs apartment dwellers (me and my sister, along with our partners) and nonna Lucia, who lives downstairs when she isn’t off on her snowbird or Molisan summer adventures, will meet on the middle floor where lunch will be served.
It’s a simple affair. Just the pasta followed by fruit and espresso. Not the stereotypical pranzo della domenica, Sunday lunch, people tend to picture when imagining Italian families tucking in to eat on that particular day: extended family, multiple courses, lingering on into the evening. But like my parents, nonni, and probably many generations before, I have also eaten my way through many of those stereotypical Sunday lunches. Until they stopped.
I haven’t done a whole lot of research on this. That’s what these Sunday Stories are sometimes for: reflections on something that has been on my mind. As always, I have a few questions for you at the end and would appreciate any thoughts or personal anecdotes about your own Sunday lunches.
Before digging deeper, here is a look at the Marsillo pranzi della domenica of the past.
As a kid, the weekends were always exceptionally fun times for food and eating. Saturday nights were for take out. Usually Chinese food or pizza (Pizza Hut, to my dad’s dismay, or Vincent Sous Marin, or Di Menna). Sundays, we would head over to Nonna Ida and Nonno Sam’s with our aunts, uncles, and, later, cousins. There, we would have homemade pasta, followed by meat and various contorni like salad, grilled veggies, potatoes, and—always—dessert. If we didn’t get home too late and got hungry, we would “fend for ourselves,” which usually meant cereal or popcorn. Treats of all kinds abounded, from the sweet to the savoury, whether from scratch or a box.
Nonna Ida and Nonno Sam’s meals are always an incredible lesson in all the possibilities of homegrown and homemade. I wrote about this in a previous Sunday Story on my relationship to cooking:
My nonno tends to a huge and fruitful garden. My nonna prepares and freezes whatever produce she can so that they (and we) can eat from the garden all year long. My nonno makes ricotta that my nonna uses to make gnocchi and ravioli. They make wine, cheese, cured meats.
Just to make you drool a little more - Sunday lunches could also include homemade spaghetti or cannelloni, also stuffed with nonno’s ricotta; sauce made from their garden tomatoes or rapini with their homemade sausage; a selection of nonna’s cookies and a cake (usually her tiramisù or lemon mousse cake, sometimes her ice cream roll). In the summer, nonno took the meat out to the grill. In the winter, it would be in the oven with potatoes. The men washed it all down with nonno’s grappa. I would go in the cupboard to pour myself a glass of red bitter with ice. New recipes developed into traditions: cheese-stuffed baked jalapeños; “tropical treats,” a big hit recipe nonna tried (and now can never escape!) from Company’s Coming: 150 Delicious Squares. Sometimes, even something a little unexpected: layered Jell-O cups; shrimp and vegetable tempura nests from Costco.
I told you, so many treats! The weekly ‘everyone-in-attendance’ Sunday lunch at my paternal nonni’s lasted (I think) until my late teens. As the years went on, the ‘day of rest’ would be overtaken by homework assignments and essays, then part time jobs. It became impossible to commit to every Sunday. A reality that, as my dad reminisces, went back to his childhood when his own aunts and uncles would come lunch with them. People get older, get married, maybe move. Though these pranzi continue to happen much more sporadically, it is rare to have everyone there at once. On my mom’s side, my nonna calls to book us in advance for our ‘zizi nights,’ when my aunt, uncle, and cousin come over for another elaborate meal she spends all day preparing.
Like many of the articles I’ve scanned through online seem to suggest, the weekly Sunday lunch is a thing of the past for many Italian families.
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Digging Deeper
And nobody had the kind of life — rooted firmly in one community, hitched to predictable rhythms — that allowed for a weekly gathering of so many relatives over such laboriously prepared food for so many hours.
Frank Bruni for The New York Times “There’s No Meal Better (or Longer) Than an Italian Sunday Lunch,” May 13, 2024
Sunday sauce originated from the peasant tradition of having meat on that day, when extended family could gather. It would be cooked over many hours in the passata, which would benefit from the flavours and fat. In Molise, sugo della domenica is typically made with pork or beef ribs. Before serving, they are removed from the sauce that is then used for the pasta. And finally scooped up with crusty bread so as not to let any go to waste. On my mom’s side, we call this meal ‘the bones.’ For us, it’s not exclusively made on Sundays anymore, but whenever we manage to get everyone around the same table. Somehow, we are both busier and more flexible.
I really enjoyed this article by Frank Bruni for The New York Times. In it, Bruni covers the (expected) reasons why the Sunday lunch, in all its glory, has mostly disappeared (usual culprits I mentioned earlier, not to mention the cost of hosting these days). But he also leaves space to question the romanticization of it all, which requires people to “swoon to the sexist myth that ‘all grandmas in Italy spend two days in the kitchen bent over a steaming pot of ragù’.” As much as I am drawn to the return of the Sunday lunch in my life as I get older, I refuse to paint it in the rose-coloured glasses of the ‘good old days’ discourse.1 That can devolve a little too quickly into the tradwifery/channeling your divine submissive feminine/you-can’t-even-give-women-a-compliment-anymore of it all for my liking.
“But sadly, the tradition is changing. Years ago, la mamma or la nonna spent all day in the kitchen making sugo and fresh-made pasta. Today, women still prepare a home-cooked meal, but more often than not use store-bought pasta.” When I see a quote like this, I shiver. This is from a blog post I found through a quick Google search for ‘Italian Sunday lunch tradition.’ The author follows this up with a phrase meant to reassure: “Still, the meal is made with love.” I realize that I rambled on about both my nonne’s cooking above, but there was also another reality to those Sunday lunches: while the men had their grappa, the women were expected to do all the dishes. This ‘tradition’ lingers to this day.
I don’t want to harp on this too much because I’ve spoken about it many times before, but we need to stop fearing change and accepting that it is part of tradition. In many cases, we cannot have the Sunday lunches we’ve had before. Adapting them to our current contexts and realities will allow the Sunday lunch to survive, in different ways.
At the heart of Sunday lunch is the sanctity of togetherness and the gift of time for those closest to you; those you could count on; those who feed you beyond the table:
Sacred because it elevated your kin above everyone else who competed for your attention, and sacred because Sunday lunch came on the Lord’s Day, when you put aside your usual work and your overarching ambitions, when you turned away from what you had to do for your material needs and tended instead to your spirit. Mass in the morning: That salved your soul. Linguine in the early afternoon: That did an even better job of it. And the overlapping voices of generations of your family keeping its stories alive and its culinary heritage intact: Those did the best job of all.2
This doesn’t depend on one day of the week, religion, or gendered expectations. Nor on a specific menu. Having Sunday lunch with my parents, sister, and nonna over a bowl of—gasp—store-bought pasta will not diminish the time spent together.
Cass
Thinking broadly of the concept of Sunday lunch, and outside of Italian culture, too, do you have a typical menu for this type of occasion? Would/do you stray from it; why or why not?
If you have also experienced the loss of Sunday lunch, what brought it on?
How do you channel the concept of Sunday lunch in your life? Here, too, I’m thinking broadly (of family, chosen family, meals, activities, etc.)
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Giuliana Colalillo is doing interesting work with her “Nonna 2.0” project, which seeks to debunk the mythology surrounding the figure of the nonna. You can watch a recent workshop she did with Accenti magazine here:
Frank Bruni, “There’s No Meal Better (or Longer) Than an Italian Sunday Lunch,” The New York Times, May 13, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/t-magazine/italy-sunday-lunch.html.
Oh the Sunday lunch! I love reading about how different families do it, and how it has changed. My family did not have this, but I quickly found out how important it is to my partner’s family. We do our own version, just us two, when we can. When we’re back in Brazil with his family Sunday lunch is sacred - his grandma makes about 5x too much food and often an enormous cake that could send a dozen people into a food coma. Everybody takes home food to start the week. There are few good reasons not to go - I’ve gone with vicious hangovers and food poisoning alike. I wish my family had this tradition, and it’s so awesome to participate. You have a wealth of cool and delicious memories to look back on - thank you so much for sharing with us!
My immediate family, which is Scottish (my parents, me, half of my daughter) and Italian (the other half of my daughter, her partner, their daughter) living in Italy, has family lunch every winter weekend and dinner in the summer, the day depending on what the youth has planned. We eat in their house, and my 91 year old father normally cooks (my parents live in the flat below my daughter's house, I live nearby). This encompases any of the London family when they are over. Who cooks is up for grabs, the important thing is to be together.