Read Online Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century by John Paul Godges - Free Book Online

folks had more than others. The richer people had iceboxes. The poorer people couldn’t even afford butter; they ate their bread with lard and sugar on top. The Di Gregorios fell somewhere between these extremes. But no matter what country the people came from—and no matter what jobs the fathers held either at the cement plant or at the Lehigh Row stores that catered to the workers at the cement plant—“everyone on Lehigh Row felt pretty much equal.”
    To underscore their equality as Americans born and bred, the four Di Gregorio children with the most difficult Italian names to pronounce changed their names. Leonata became Leola. Raffaello became Ralph. Bice became Bessie. And Algisa became Elsie. The Di Gregorio kids still called one another by their Italian names in private, but they used their American names in public. Only Mafalda and Ida kept their names the same.
     
    Food on Lehigh Row was rarely, if ever, just food.
    Maria used the nightly ritual of dinner to teach the Di Gregorio kids a vital lesson of survival in America. “It’s not how much money you make ,” she often told them. “It’s how much you save .” She demonstrated the lesson with each evening’s meal. The family had grown to nine with the birth of Angelina, who later became Angeline, in 1929. Regardless of their ages, sizes, or genders, all seven kids had inherited those big Farindola hands to feed. Maria’s hand-rolled egg noodles stretched the family budget as far as the spaghetti could. Her little garden plots yielded an abundance of fresh vegetables for the table and canned ones for the winter. When she bought food, she bought it only in volume, filling the basement with bundles of fresh garlic, crates of onions, bushels of apples, gallons of olive oil, 10-pound bags of corn meal, 20-pound boxes of rigatoni, 20-pound rolls of asiago cheese, and 50-pound sacks of flour.
    As the kids began to assemble before dinner, her lesson began to unfold in earnest. She pulled out a cutting board, four feet in length by three feet in width, that Serafino had cut and finished with his own hands. She covered the entire dining table with the board and coated it in flour. She spread a half-inch-thick layer of hot polenta all over the board, allowing the polenta to cool. Once the kids were all seated at the table, captivated by the colossal polenta pie spreading out before them, she invited them each to carve their own portions. She then smothered each portion in a sauce of her fresh-grown tomatoes and homemade sausage—each mouth-watering plateful a testament to frugality and resourcefulness. Each precious piece of the pie a veritable incarnation of virtue itself.
    Dinner, on the table every night at 5 p.m., was far more than just a meal. “It was a source of family pride,” Ida reminisced. “It was a big celebration. It was sacred.”
    The porch became an oven in summer and a refrigerator in winter. Literally. In summer, Maria cooked outside with a kerosene stove to keep the rest of the house cool. In winter, she froze Jell-O on the porch. With no icebox, the Di Gregorios ate chilled food only in the winter. Maria made the cooking and cooling processes themselves paragons of conservation. “Mama could make somethin’ outta nothin’,” Ida recalled.
    Pigs were meant to last. Once a year, the Di Gregorios bought a pig from the neighboring farm and butchered the animal. One pig per year. They killed the pig only in the early winter to take advantage of the natural refrigeration. All winter long, the two sides of the pig dangled in the front porch, while the sausage dried on a clothesline.
    Killing the pigs required teamwork. Each pig weighed between 250 and 300 pounds. It took three men to pin a pig to the ground while a fourth man sliced the neck or pierced the heart with a knife. Groups of men from Lehigh Row bought their pigs on the same day so they could help each other do the killing.
    The killing was just the beginning. Once their pig was