Sit down. You look thin.

I'm Angela. I'm 58, I live in Johnston, Rhode Island, ten minutes from Federal Hill, and every Sunday of my life there have been between twelve and eighteen people at my table, or my mother's table before it, eating the same thing: macaroni with the gravy, the meat from the gravy on a platter, a salad after, and then the coffee. My husband Sal, my three kids and their husbands and wife, six grandchildren, my brother Vinnie and whoever he brings, my mother (God rest her, since March of 1998; her rules are below and they still apply), and my neighbor Dot, who is Irish and has eaten here every Sunday since 1979 and now argues about the gravy like she was born to it.

My daughter-in-law Karen set this up on the computer for me because she got tired of me dictating the meatballs over the phone. So here it is. The recipes are real, they are my mother's and her mother's, and they work if you do what I say. If you change them, don't tell me. If they come out good, that's my recipe. If they come out bad, you changed something.

Every Sunday somebody starts this. Usually Dot. So let's settle it.

Sauce is what you put on macaroni on a Wednesday. Tomatoes, garlic, oil, basil, twenty minutes. Marinara. It's very nice. My mother would make it in the summer when the tomatoes came in from my father's garden and it was too hot to stand over the stove. That's sauce.

Gravy is what you make on Sunday. It goes on the stove at eight in the morning, after early Mass, and it cooks all day with the meat in it: the pork, the sausage, the meatballs, the braciole. The meat cooks in the gravy and the gravy cooks in the meat, and by two o'clock you can't tell where one stops. It's thick and dark and it tastes like pork and it has been in a pot for six hours. That's not sauce. Sauce is thin. That's gravy. Everybody in Providence, everybody in my family in New York and New Jersey, and everybody who came over from the same part of Italy my grandmother did calls it gravy, and we called it gravy before Dot's people knew what a tomato was.

Now. My cousin Theresa's husband, who is from the North End in Boston, calls it sauce. He's a good man and I love him, and he's wrong, and he's welcome at my table every Sunday to be wrong in person. My grandson Michael, who's eleven, asked me last week if it's gravy because it's brown like turkey gravy. No, Michael. It's gravy because Grandma Marchetti called it gravy. That's the whole reason. Eat.

1. The gravy goes on by eight. If it goes on at nine you're eating at three and everybody knows why.
2. The wooden spoon, only. Metal in the gravy is a sin. I have her spoon. It's fifty years old and it's a different color than when she bought it. Nobody else touches it.
3. The big pot is the gravy pot. It is not for soup, it is not for corn, it is not for boiling a lobster, Vinnie.
4. You brown the meat. All of it. Separately. In the pot. If you don't brown the meat you're making soup with meatballs in it.
5. Nobody eats a meatball out of the pot before dinner. This rule is broken every Sunday by everyone, including me, and she knew it and she made extra. That is the real rule: make extra.
6. The meat comes out on a platter. The gravy goes on the macaroni. You do not bury the braciole under the rigatoni like an animal.
7. No cheese on fish. This is for Christmas Eve. It's still a rule.
8. You don't buy it in a jar. She never said this rule out loud because it never occurred to her that a person might.
9. Everybody sits. Everybody eats. Nobody leaves hungry and nobody leaves before the coffee. Dot has been trying to leave before the coffee for twenty years.

Read the whole thing before you start. Make the meatballs and the braciole first (they're below), so they're ready to go in. This takes all morning. That's what the morning is for.

Braciole is a thin slice of beef rolled up around a stuffing and tied and cooked in the gravy until you can cut it with a fork. It's the piece everybody fights over. Make two.

Beans and macaroni. This is what fed my grandmother's family through the Depression on the Hill and it's still the best thing you can make for eight people for five dollars. Serves 8.

You need a pizzelle iron for these, the electric kind that makes two at a time with the pattern on them. Every Italian house in Rhode Island has one in the cabinet over the refrigerator. If you don't have one, ask your neighbor. If your neighbor's not Italian, ask Dot; I gave her one in 1985.

Dinner isn't over when the plates go. Dinner's over when the coffee's done, and in my house that means the little aluminum stovetop pot, the eight-cup one, that screws together in the middle and gurgles on the back burner, and then the six-cup one right behind it because eight is never enough. No machine. Sal bought me a machine in 1994 and it's in the basement with the fondue pot.

Fill the bottom with water to the little valve, not over. Fill the basket with the fine dark grind, level, don't pack it down. Screw it together tight. Low flame. When it starts to sputter, off the fire. Into the little cups, the good ones with the gold rim, which come out on Sunday and never for a Wednesday. A sugar cube on the saucer. A twist of lemon peel for Vinnie, anisette in it for Sal, a splash of the sambuca for my son-in-law who thinks I don't see him. The pizzelle on a plate, the biscotti if somebody brought them, and the fruit and nuts in a bowl for whoever's still hungry, which is Michael.

Then everybody sits another hour and argues about the gravy. That's the Sunday. That's the whole thing. You do it fifty-two times a year for fifty years, and one day you're the grandmother and the coffee is yours to make.

Christmas Eve is the one night a year there's no meat on my table, and it's the biggest meal of the year. Seven fishes, at least. (My mother did nine. My aunt Connie claimed eleven. Nobody ever counted Aunt Connie's.) Karen says I should put the recipes up in December when people need them, so this is just the menu, so you can start looking for the baccalà now, because it takes three days of soaking and the good stuff sells out on the Hill.

1. Baccalà (salt cod), as a cold salad with olives, celery, oil and lemon, and also fried.
2. Fried smelts. Whole. Yes, whole. Eat around what you don't want.
3. Calamari, stuffed with breadcrumbs and simmered in a light sauce (Sauce. Christmas Eve it's sauce. No meat, so it's sauce. See, I'm fair.)
4. Shrimp, scampi-style, with a lot of garlic and a lot of butter and bread to push it around.
5. Stuffies, which are stuffed quahogs, and if you're not from Rhode Island you'll have to come here to have them right. Big clams, chopped, with breadcrumbs, chourico if you're feeling Portuguese, back in the shell, baked.
6. Linguine with white clam sauce. No cheese. Rule 7. I will see you.
7. Anchovies, in the spaghetti aglio e olio that comes out at eleven o'clock for whoever's still standing before midnight Mass.

My mother also did the eel, which she bought alive on Atwells Avenue the week before and kept in the bathtub, and I want it known that I've made a decision as the grandmother and we don't do the eel anymore. Vinnie can take that up with me in person.