What Frank Sinatra's Mother Actually Cooked in Hoboken

He gave the recipe out for fifty years and eventually sold it in jars, and almost nobody read it properly. Four cloves of garlic, browned and then thrown away. Canned tomatoes. Twenty minutes on the stove. No meat in it anywhere, and butter on the spaghetti. That is not a Sunday gravy, and it is not Sicilian cooking, which raises a question about the most famous Italian-American kitchen in the country. This one follows the recipe back to where it came from. A hamlet called Rossi, in the town of Lumarzo, in the hills behind Genoa, where Natalina Garaventa was born before her family carried her to Hoboken. What her valley actually ate, what her Sicilian husband brought to the same stove, what the shops on Adams Street could and could not sell her, and why the woman everyone pictures at the pot was out running a political ward and delivering babies at fifty dollars a time. If you like these, there are more of them here: https://www.youtube.com/@MulberryStreetMemo?sub_confirmation=1 Also in this one: the tavern the family ran through Prohibition, the Yiddish-speaking neighbour who fed him coffee cake and apples when nobody else was home, the meatball recipe that might not be his mother's at all, the pesto he had shipped from Genoa to California every two months for decades, and the jar of sauce he put his own name on in 1989 that was off the shelves by 1992.