In Italian-American households from South Philadelphia to Staten Island to the North End of Boston, Sunday morning started the same way: someone got up early, browned pork in a heavy pot, and started the gravy. By the time the family got back from church, the whole apartment smelled like tomatoes and rendered fat. The sauce cooked for three or four hours, not because it had to, but because Sunday was the day for it.
The dishes that came out of that pot were not weeknight food. Braciole had to be stuffed and tied before it went in the sauce. Lasagna had to be layered and baked after the sauce was ready. Stuffed shells had to be filled one by one. These are the recipes that filled Sunday tables in Italian-American neighborhoods from the 1940s through the 1980s, the ones where the work started before breakfast and the table was set by one in the afternoon.
1. Sunday Gravy with Meatballs and Italian Sausage
Sunday gravy is the slow-braised meat-and-tomato dish Italian-American families have been making since at least the early twentieth century, when immigrants from Naples and the towns around it brought the tradition with them. The pot starts with bones and cheap cuts, usually a few pork ribs or a neck bone, browned hard in olive oil until the bottom is lacquered with dark bits. Skip the browning and the finished gravy tastes like canned tomatoes with meat dropped in.
The smell was what Sunday morning actually meant: olive oil heating before the coffee was finished, pork sizzling loud enough to wake up the second floor. A pot of Sunday gravy needs at least three hours, so most families put it on between eight and nine in the morning and had it on the table in the early afternoon. The meatballs here are a mix of ground beef and pork; the beef holds them together, but pork is where the flavor comes from. Some families also add a piece of braciole, but that is a different dish and a different Sunday argument.
In Italian-American communities in Newark’s North Ward and around South Philadelphia’s 9th Street Italian Market, this meat-enriched tomato sauce has long been called “gravy,” not sauce; the word “sauce” in those kitchens referred only to a plain marinara. The dish descends from ragù napoletano, a Neapolitan Sunday tradition where the braising liquid is served over pasta as a first course and the cooked meat comes out separately as a second.
Ingredients (Serves 8)
1 pound ground beef (80/20)
1/2 cup plain dried breadcrumbs
1/2 cup finely grated Pecorino Romano cheese
3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 cup olive oil, divided
1 1/2 pounds pork spare ribs, cut into individual ribs
2 pounds sweet Italian sausage links (about 8 links)
1 medium yellow onion, finely diced
6 garlic cloves, sliced thin
1 small can (6 ounces) tomato paste
2 cans (28 ounces each) crushed tomatoes
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
10 large fresh basil leaves
2 pounds rigatoni or ziti
Grated Pecorino Romano, for the table
Instructions
1. Make the meatball mixture: Combine the ground beef, ground pork, eggs, breadcrumbs, 1/2 cup Pecorino Romano, milk, minced garlic, parsley, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon black pepper in a large bowl. Mix with your hands just until the ingredients come together; keep mixing to a minimum or the meatballs will be dense. Roll into balls about 1 3/4 inches across. You should get 20 to 24 meatballs. Set them on a rimmed baking sheet.
2. Brown the pork ribs: Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pot of at least 7 quarts over medium-high heat. Add the spare ribs and brown on all sides, about 3 to 4 minutes per side. Transfer to a large plate.
3. Brown the sausage: Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil to the same pot. Add the sausage links and brown on all sides, turning occasionally, about 6 to 8 minutes total. Transfer to the plate with the ribs.
4. Brown the meatballs: Working in two batches so you do not crowd the pot, add the meatballs and brown on two sides only, about 2 minutes per side. They will not be cooked through at this point, which is fine. Transfer to the plate.
5. Build the base: Lower the heat to medium. Add the diced onion to the pot and cook, stirring and scraping up any dark bits from the bottom, until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the sliced garlic and cook 1 minute more.
6. Add the tomato paste and wine: Spoon the tomato paste into the center of the pot and press it against the hot bottom, stirring, for 2 minutes until it shifts from bright red to brick-colored. Pour in the red wine and stir, scraping the bottom of the pot completely clean.
7. Add the tomatoes: Pour in both cans of crushed tomatoes and 1 cup of water. Stir in the oregano, red pepper flakes, 2 teaspoons salt, and 1/2 teaspoon black pepper. Bring to a gentle simmer over medium heat.
8. Return the meat: Set the pork ribs into the sauce first. Add the sausage links. Place the meatballs on top last. The sauce should come about halfway up the meatballs.
9. Simmer: Lay the basil leaves over the meat. Cover the pot with the lid slightly ajar. Cook over very low heat for at least 3 hours, stirring gently every 30 minutes and taking care not to break the meatballs. The gravy is done when it is thick and dark red and the pork pulls away from the bone with no resistance.
10. Finish and serve: Lift out the pork ribs. Shred any remaining meat from them back into the pot and discard the bones. Taste and add more salt if needed. Cook the rigatoni or ziti in heavily salted boiling water according to the package directions, drain, and toss with enough gravy to coat. Divide among 8 plates. Top each with one sausage link and two or three meatballs, then spoon extra gravy over the top. Pass grated Pecorino Romano at the table.
2. Braciole (Stuffed Beef Rolls in Tomato Sauce)
Braciole is thin beef rolled around a filling of breadcrumbs, Pecorino Romano, hard-boiled egg, pine nuts, and golden raisins, then tied with kitchen twine and browned before it goes into the Sunday pot. Most Italian-American families kept it plainer than that. The pine nuts and golden raisins below are the Sicilian-style version, one family variation among several, and they trace back to Arab influence on Sicilian cooking rather than to anything that happened in America. Leave them out and nobody would call the result wrong.
In most households, the grandmother or mother was up before anyone else, browning the rolls and getting the pot on the stove before the rest of the family was awake. The braciole went in first because it needed the most time. By the time mass was over and everyone was back at the table, the sauce had been going for close to three hours, and it smelled nothing like a can of tomatoes anymore. The rolls sliced easily at the table, and a leftover piece eaten cold the next morning with bread was a perfectly reasonable breakfast.
In Italy, braciola on its own usually means a chop or a cut of meat on the bone; the stuffed-and-rolled meaning is southern Italian, and that is the one that crossed over. In New Orleans, where Sicilians settled the lower French Quarter in large numbers from the 1880s, the same idea is built as one large roll called braciolone, made from top round pounded thin and filled with breadcrumbs, cheese, hard-boiled egg, and parsley.
Ingredients (Makes 6 braciole, serves 6)
6 slices beef top round, about 5 ounces each, pounded to 1/4 inch thick
6 thin slices prosciutto di Parma, about 3 ounces total
1/2 cup plain dry breadcrumbs
1/3 cup finely grated Pecorino Romano
3 tablespoons golden raisins
2 tablespoons flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
2 hard-boiled eggs, sliced thin
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
4 cups crushed tomatoes or tomato passata
Instructions
1. If the beef slices are not already thin, place each one between two sheets of plastic wrap and pound with a meat mallet to an even 1/4-inch thickness.
2. Stir the breadcrumbs, Pecorino Romano, pine nuts, raisins, parsley, garlic, and pepper together in a bowl.
3. Lay one slice of prosciutto flat on each beef slice. Divide the breadcrumb mixture evenly among the six pieces and spread it to within 1/2 inch of the edges. Lay one or two thin slices of hard-boiled egg on top of the filling on each piece.
4. Roll each piece up tightly from a short end. Tie each roll at 1-inch intervals with kitchen twine. Season the outside of the rolls lightly with salt.
5. Heat the olive oil in a wide, heavy pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Brown the rolls on all sides, turning every 2 minutes. Work in two batches if they do not fit in a single layer; the goal is a real sear, not steaming. Total browning time is 8 to 10 minutes per batch.
6. Pour the red wine into the pot and scrape up the browned bits from the bottom with a wooden spoon. Let the wine reduce by half, about 4 to 5 minutes.
7. Add the crushed tomatoes. Return all the rolls to the pot. The sauce should come at least halfway up the sides of the rolls; add a splash of water if it does not. Bring to a simmer, then reduce the heat to low. Cover and cook for 2 hours, turning the rolls once at the 1-hour mark, until the beef is completely tender when pierced with the tip of a paring knife. Taste the sauce and add salt as needed.
8. Remove the twine from each roll before serving. Serve the rolls with the braising sauce spooned over them. The same sauce dresses pasta as a first course before the rolls come to the table.
3. Lasagna
Lasagna in Italy is not one dish. The version that shows up on Italian-American Sunday tables, with ricotta, mozzarella, ground meat, and tomato sauce layered between broad noodles, comes from the southern Italian tradition, particularly from Campania and Calabria. Up in Bologna, lasagna al forno is built with green spinach pasta, a long-cooked meat ragù, and béchamel instead of ricotta. The families who came through Ellis Island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were largely from the south, and their lasagna came with them.
What the American version kept from its Neapolitan ancestor is the structure: broad noodles, ricotta, and a meat-heavy layer, built in a deep dish and baked until the edges went dark. What it dropped was most of the labor, and what replaced it was a pound of ground beef and a half pound of sausage browned straight into the sauce. Sunday lasagna in New Jersey or South Philadelphia could still take three hours from sauce pot to table, and that was considered a reasonable morning of cooking.
The ancestor of most Italian-American Sunday lasagna is Lasagna di Carnevale, the Neapolitan dish made in the days before Lent, which layered tiny fried meatballs called polpettine, hard-boiled eggs, Neapolitan salami, and ricotta between sheets of dried curly-edged semolina pasta called lasagna riccia. The dried curly sheet is the detail that separates it from the Bolognese build; the ruffled semolina sheet holds up under the weight of a heavy filling in a way a fresh sheet does not.
Ingredients (Makes one 9×13 pan, serves 8 to 10)
1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
1 pound 80/20 ground beef
1/2 pound sweet Italian sausage, casings removed
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 cans (28 ounces each) crushed tomatoes
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 pounds whole-milk ricotta
1/2 cup grated Pecorino Romano
1/4 cup fresh flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
12 dry lasagna noodles (from one 16-ounce box), or one 9-ounce box oven-ready lasagna sheets
1 pound whole-milk mozzarella, shredded (about 4 cups)
1/2 cup grated Pecorino Romano
Instructions
1. Heat the olive oil in a large heavy pot over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and translucent, about 8 minutes. Add the garlic and cook 1 minute more.
2. Add the ground beef and sausage. Break up the meat with a wooden spoon and cook until no pink remains, about 10 minutes. Drain off any excess fat.
3. Stir in the tomato paste and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Pour in both cans of crushed tomatoes. Add the oregano, basil, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper. Bring to a simmer, reduce the heat to low, and cook uncovered for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens noticeably. Taste and add salt if needed. If you are using oven-ready sheets, stir in 1/2 cup of water at the end, because they need a looser sauce to soften properly.
4. While the sauce simmers, make the ricotta filling. Combine the 2 pounds of ricotta, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup Pecorino Romano, parsley, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper in a large bowl and stir until smooth. Cover and refrigerate until you are ready to assemble.
5. If using dry noodles, bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Cook the lasagna noodles for 8 to 9 minutes, just short of fully tender. Drain and lay them flat on a lightly oiled baking sheet so they do not stick together. Skip this step if using oven-ready sheets.
6. Heat the oven to 375°F. Ladle about 1 cup of the meat sauce into the bottom of a deep 9×13-inch baking dish of at least 5-quart capacity, meaning a full 3 inches deep, and spread it into an even layer. Set the dish on a rimmed sheet pan; a full lasagna bubbles over the sides of a shallow pan.
7. Lay 4 noodles over the sauce, overlapping them slightly to cover the bottom. Spread half the ricotta filling over the noodles in an even layer. Scatter 1 1/3 cups of the shredded mozzarella over the ricotta. Ladle about 1 1/2 cups of the meat sauce over the cheese.
8. Lay 4 more noodles over the sauce. Spread the remaining ricotta filling over those noodles. Scatter another 1 1/3 cups of mozzarella over the ricotta. Ladle about 1 cup of sauce over the cheese.
9. Lay the final 4 noodles over the sauce. Ladle about 1 1/2 cups of sauce over the top noodle layer and spread it evenly. Pass whatever sauce is left at the table. Scatter the remaining 1 1/3 cups of mozzarella and the remaining 1/2 cup of Pecorino Romano over the top.
10. Cover the baking dish tightly with aluminum foil. Bake for 40 minutes, then remove the foil and bake for an additional 20 to 25 minutes, until the cheese is browned in spots and the sauce is bubbling around the edges. An instant-read thermometer inserted into the center should read 160°F.
11. Remove from the oven and let the lasagna rest uncovered for at least 20 minutes before cutting. The layers firm up during this rest and hold their shape when you slice.
4. Stuffed Shells (Conchiglioni with Ricotta)
Stuffed shells is Italian-American cooking more than Italian cooking. Conchiglioni, the large pasta shells made for stuffing, exist in Italian pantries, but in Italy they typically get filled with meat or fish. The ricotta-and-egg version that became a Sunday fixture in Italian-American kitchens, baked under a layer of red gravy, developed here. By the 1960s it was a familiar sight on Italian-American Sunday tables, usually sharing a sideboard with the braciole and the bread.
Polly-O whole-milk ricotta, the brand Italian-American cooks in the Northeast have been buying for decades, comes in 15-ounce containers, and one container is enough for a full 9-by-13 pan of shells. Supermarket ricotta holds more moisture than it once did, and wet filling will pool at the bottom of the pan and make the shells slide apart. Drain the ricotta in a colander lined with cheesecloth for 30 minutes before you mix anything. Cook more shells than the pan needs, because a quarter of them will split along the seam during boiling and you want spares.
Barilla’s American box is labeled only ‘Jumbo Shells’ and holds 12 ounces, but the shape inside is conchiglioni rigati, the ridged die. You will not find the word rigati anywhere on the box; you see the ridges when you open it, and they grip a heavy gravy in a way a smooth shell never does.
Ingredients (Makes about 24 stuffed shells, serves 6)
12-ounce box jumbo shells (conchiglioni rigati), such as Barilla
15 ounces whole-milk ricotta (one 15-ounce container), drained
1 1/2 cups shredded whole-milk mozzarella, divided
1/3 cup finely grated Pecorino Romano
3 tablespoons fresh flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
3 cups Sunday gravy or marinara, divided
Instructions
1. Line a colander with cheesecloth or two layers of paper towels and set it over a bowl. Spoon in the ricotta and let it drain for 30 minutes at room temperature.
2. Heat the oven to 375°F. Spread 1 cup of the gravy across the bottom of a 9-by-13-inch baking dish.
3. Bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a boil. Add all the shells from the box and cook until they are pliable but still slightly firm at the center, about 2 minutes less than the package time. Drain, rinse under cold water, and spread them out on a kitchen towel in a single layer so they do not stick together.
4. Combine the drained ricotta, egg, 1 cup of the mozzarella, the Pecorino Romano, parsley, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Stir until evenly combined.
5. Discard any shells that split along the seam. Fill 24 of the best ones with about 2 tablespoons of the ricotta mixture each, using a small spoon or cookie scoop. Arrange the filled shells open-side up in the baking dish in a single layer.
6. Spoon the remaining 2 cups of gravy over the shells. Scatter the remaining 1/2 cup of mozzarella over the top.
7. Cover the dish tightly with foil and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for another 10 to 15 minutes, until the cheese is browned in spots and the gravy is bubbling around the edges.
8. Let the shells rest for 5 minutes before serving.
5. Manicotti
Manicotti is the dish on this list that rewarded a cook who planned ahead. A box of the dried tubes kept in the pantry for months, so there was never a Sunday when the pasta was the reason it could not be made, and the filling is nothing more than ricotta, eggs, cheese, and parsley. That made it the cheapest of the baked dishes here, and the one most likely to turn up on a Sunday when money was thin.
Filling manicotti shells is the slowest job in this entire article. A spoon works, but it is slow and it splits the tubes, which is why the steps below turn a zip-top bag into a piping bag instead. The other thing worth knowing is that the shells go into the pan underdone on purpose, a minute short of the seven the box calls for. They finish cooking in the oven under the sauce, and a shell that went in fully cooked comes out soft and falling apart.
In Italian, manicotti means “little sleeves,” from the word manica. The Italian equivalent is cannelloni, which in Italy is almost always made from fresh pasta sheets rolled around the filling; the ridged dried tubes in the Barilla 8-ounce box, which holds 14 shells, are the Italian-American version of the dish.
Ingredients (Makes 12 to 14 filled shells, serves 4 to 6)
1 box (8 ounces) Barilla manicotti pasta (14 shells)
1 pound whole-milk ricotta
1 1/2 cups shredded low-moisture mozzarella (about 6 ounces), divided
3/4 cup finely grated Pecorino Romano, divided
3 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3 cups Sunday gravy or marinara sauce, divided
Instructions
1. Heat the oven to 375°F.
2. Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Add the manicotti shells and cook for 6 minutes, stirring occasionally so they do not stick together. Drain and spread them in a single layer on a clean kitchen towel to cool.
3. In a large bowl, combine the ricotta, egg, 1 cup of the mozzarella, 1/2 cup of the Pecorino Romano, the parsley, salt, and pepper. Stir until well combined.
4. Spread 1 cup of the sauce in an even layer over the bottom of a 9-by-13-inch baking dish.
5. Spoon the filling into a large zip-top bag, press out the air, and seal it. Snip about 3/4 inch off one corner. Pipe filling into each cooked shell from both ends, working until the shell feels full with no hollow spots in the center. Lay each filled shell in a single layer in the baking dish as you go.
6. Pour the remaining 2 cups of sauce over the shells and spread to cover them completely. Scatter the remaining 1/2 cup mozzarella and 1/4 cup Pecorino Romano evenly over the top.
7. Cover the dish tightly with aluminum foil and bake for 35 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for another 10 to 15 minutes, until the cheese is bubbling and golden in spots.
8. Let the manicotti rest for 10 minutes before serving.
6. Eggplant Parmigiana
Eggplant Parmigiana has nothing to do with Parma, and it has nothing to do with northern Italy either. By the middle of the twentieth century it was a fixture in Italian-American households from Boston to Chicago to South Philadelphia. It is also the only dish on this list built around a vegetable, which is a good part of why it showed up as often as it did.
Eggplant was cheap, which mattered in a house feeding eight or ten people on a Sunday. Two large eggplants stretched into enough slices to fill a 9-by-13 pan with three layers. The Sunday version got the full treatment: homemade sauce from the morning’s gravy pot, fresh mozzarella from the Italian deli if it could be had, and a long bake while the rest of dinner came together. The frying happened first, before mass or right after, and the kitchen held the smell of oil for most of the morning.
Despite the name, most food historians trace the dish to Campania and Sicily, where it appears in Neapolitan cookbooks as early as the 18th century; in Sicilian dialect, ‘parmiciana’ is thought to refer to the overlapping slats of a wooden shutter, which the layered eggplant slices resemble.
Ingredients (Serves 6 to 8)
2 large eggplants (about 2 1/2 pounds total), sliced crosswise 1/4 inch thick
1 1/2 cups plain dry breadcrumbs
About 2 cups vegetable oil, for frying
1 pound low-moisture mozzarella, shredded (about 4 cups)
1 cup finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, torn
Instructions
1. Lay the eggplant slices in a single layer on two large sheet pans or across a cutting board. Sprinkle both sides evenly with the 1 tablespoon of kosher salt. Let them sit for 45 minutes; they will release liquid and turn slightly limp. Rinse each slice under cold water, then pat completely dry with paper towels.
2. Set up a breading station: spread the flour in one shallow dish, beat the eggs with the milk in a second dish, and spread the breadcrumbs in a third.
3. Working one slice at a time, dredge in flour and shake off the excess, dip in the egg mixture and let any excess drip off, then press into the breadcrumbs to coat both sides. Set the coated slices on a clean sheet pan.
4. Pour the vegetable oil into a large skillet to a depth of about 1/4 inch and heat over medium-high until a pinch of breadcrumbs dropped in sizzles immediately. Fry the eggplant slices in batches without crowding, 2 to 3 minutes per side, until deep golden brown. Transfer to a paper-towel-lined sheet pan and season lightly with salt to taste.
5. Heat the oven to 375°F. Spread 1/2 cup of tomato sauce across the bottom of a 9-by-13-inch baking dish.
6. Lay one layer of fried eggplant slices over the sauce, overlapping the edges slightly. Spoon 1 cup of sauce over the eggplant. Scatter 1 1/3 cups of shredded mozzarella and 1/3 cup of Parmigiano-Reggiano over the sauce, then scatter a third of the torn basil leaves on top.
7. Add a second layer of eggplant. Spoon another 1 cup of sauce over it, then add another 1 1/3 cups of mozzarella, another 1/3 cup of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and another third of the basil.
8. Add the final layer of eggplant. Spread the remaining 1/2 cup of sauce over the top, then scatter the remaining 1 1/3 cups of mozzarella, the remaining 1/3 cup of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and the remaining basil over everything.
9. Cover the dish loosely with foil and bake for 25 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for another 20 to 25 minutes, until the cheese is browned in spots and the sauce is bubbling at the edges. Let the dish rest for 15 minutes before cutting so the layers have time to set and slices hold together when you lift them out.
7. Baked Ziti
Baked pasta is not an American invention. Pasta al forno runs all through Naples and Sicily, and anelletti al forno is still a Sunday dish in Palermo. What grew up in the northeastern United States, in families that had come over from those same towns, is this particular build: ricotta stirred all the way through the pasta instead of layered over it, and a lid of mozzarella browned hard on top. It became the dish that could feed a crowd out of a pan that cost almost nothing.
Sunday baked ziti was made in a 13×9-inch pan, sometimes two of them. It was not a delicate dish. The ricotta went in by the two-pound container, the mozzarella was grated from a block, and the sauce was whatever had been simmering since morning. Some families added Italian sausage crumbled into the layers; others kept it meatless for a Lenten table or a Friday-adjacent gathering. It baked covered in foil for the first half, uncovered for the second, and it came out of the oven with browned cheese edges and enough steam to fog the kitchen. It also reheated beautifully, which meant it was the dish that showed up at every wake, every new baby, and every neighbor who had just gotten out of the hospital.
Ziti takes its name from the Neapolitan dialect word “zita,” meaning bride, because long hollow ziti was traditionally broken by hand over the pot at Campanian wedding feasts. In Italian-American kitchens, the short pre-cut form sold in one-pound boxes by Barilla and Ronzoni replaced it entirely.
Ingredients (Serves 8 to 10)
32 ounces whole-milk ricotta (one standard 2-pound container)
3/4 cup finely grated Pecorino Romano, divided
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
4 cups marinara or tomato sauce, divided
1 pound whole-milk mozzarella, shredded (about 4 cups), divided
Instructions
1. Heat the oven to 375°F. Bring a large pot of water to a boil, add the tablespoon of kosher salt, and cook the ziti for 2 minutes less than the package directions. Drain and return the pasta to the pot.
2. In a large bowl, stir together the ricotta, eggs, 1/2 cup of the Pecorino Romano, and the black pepper until smooth. Stir in 1 cup of the marinara sauce.
3. Pour the ricotta mixture over the drained pasta and stir to coat. Add about 2 cups (half) of the shredded mozzarella and stir again.
4. Spread 1 cup of the remaining marinara sauce across the bottom of a deep 13×9-inch baking dish of at least 5-quart capacity, meaning a full 3 inches deep, or divide everything between two standard 13×9 pans. Set the dish on a rimmed sheet pan. Pour in the pasta mixture and spread it into an even layer.
5. Spoon the final 2 cups of marinara sauce over the top. Scatter the remaining mozzarella (about 2 cups) across the surface, then sprinkle the remaining 1/4 cup of Pecorino Romano over everything.
6. Cover the dish tightly with aluminum foil and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for another 20 to 25 minutes, until the cheese is browned in spots and the edges are actively bubbling. Let the ziti rest for at least 10 minutes before cutting and serving.
These are the dishes that made Sunday a production worth showing up for. The gravy was always the same pot. What went into it changed week to week.
Dining and Cooking