Celebrating Dago Red, rat cheese, sizzling sausage and love in a world where everyone's name ends with a vowel and where I wish I could visit again

I’d guess I was 14 or 15 when Mr. Conte lifted the gallon bottle of Dago Red from beneath the kitchen table, set it on the plastic, red-checkered tablecloth and filled up a milk glass, pushing it over to me.

He quickly turned to the portable frying pan on the tabletop. Trying his best to avoid the hot spatters of fat that flavored the air, he fished out an Italian sausage and put it on a floral plate.

Then three more were offered to the plate in the middle of the crowded table. He slowly added another batch of sausage to the fryer, with accompanying pops and sizzles while he smiled, probably because the hot spatter didn’t touch him.

He filled up another milk glass with Dago Red for my brother, Eric, and his own grandsons Ronnie and Robbie Conte, who lived with my Aunt Frances and Uncle Al in the white house just across the side yard from Mr. Conte’s house in Lackawanna, New York.

Well, to most people this would be called “Buffalo,” as Mr. Conte and his older son, my Godfather Al Conte, had houses in a quiet section off Abbott Road (I may have this wrong) that led straight from their suburban homes into the city that everyone nowadays thinks of as the home of hot chicken wings.

For me, well, it’s forever a city of love, home-pressed wine, “meataballs” (the correct local pronunciation) and pasta.  “Spaghett…”

It was Easter time in Buffalo when the four cousins feasted and drank thanks to Mr. Conte. Of course, it was Easter everywhere, but my Mom and Dad annually brought us to Buffalo for Easter.  We also generally came at least once during the summer, and I do remember a few Thanksgivings.

I don't have photos of everyone in this tale, but here are two of my heroes: My Dad, the underfed "Emmy", with a gangland fedora, and my Uncle Al, my Godfather. Though good and quiet and mostly peaceful guys, they knew how to dress to kill. By the way, I can talk about Dago Red and that population in general, because I am one. Don't call me "Dago," though. I might become offended.

But the Easters were our holiday to be in this old steel mill city --  I remember as a kid that the sky was a yellow-brown and smelled like rotten eggs, day and night, as the mills belched their exhaust from the smokestacks that filled the landscape on the eastern edge of Lake Erie.

Next to the plate where the steaming sausages landed that afternoon was another plate covered with pieces of what my Aunt Frances called “rat cheese.”  It was gorgonzola, kin of blue cheese, but much stronger and not as brittle. Great with Dago Red. The wine, I should note, always was stored in the refrigerator, as Italians take their wine chilled.

A loaf of Italian Pane Francese – French bread with an Italian accent – lay on the table, inviting us to grab a hunk and bite into it after a mouthful of sausage or before our next sip of the Dago Red.

No matter where we lived – Sylvan Lake or Grand Rapids, Michigan, or Deerfield, Illinois, in the Chicago suburbs, Dad piled us into his car and drove us to Buffalo every Easter until I was out of high school.

There were traditions just in the journey. Every trip paused, almost at the very end, to roll up to Niagara Falls. If it was still winter, large chunks of the falls were frozen, mammoth ice chunks, as the water roared around them.  If the cold weather had ended, then we’d just watch. In either case, the falls at night were illuminated by a rainbow of colored spotlights. I don’t know if they still do it.  I’ve not been back since everybody died.

My Buffalo Easters were in the 1950s and 1960s. I do believe the Falls remain, but I don’t know about the lighting customs.  Probably fancier than colored spotlights in this digital age. Surely computerized LED color prevails, and no park ranger has to flip the switch at night.

The pause at the Falls for us always was anticipated and we would get out of the car, regardless of the temperature, to look in awe at the colored display of natural fury and glory.

Then Dad would load us back up, Mom, me and my brother, Eric, and drive to the second-story flat where Gramma Ghianni and Aunt Rita lived.  Grandpa Ghianni had already flown the coop to live in Long Beach, California, surrounded by similarly minded Dagos.  Rita, who had been a saloon singer, did marry once, or so the unspoken story goes. We didn’t talk about it. He probably was the guy in the pinstripe suit who flipped me and Eric silver dollars to appease and silence us when we were elementary school students and Rita was a blonde showgirl. The dollar-flipping gent looked like an extra on “The Untouchables.”

Anyway, that left Uncle Al with the task of dealing, lovingly, with three hard-headed Italian women, Gramma, Rita and his wife, Fran. God, I loved them all. Loved Al most.

The stairway to Gramma and Rita’s large flat at 158 Folger (I may have the address wrong, as it has been more than a half-century ago, so give me a break) was filled with the aromas of Easter.

Well, for most folks, we’d be talking ham and scalloped potatoes here. But what we could smell were the “meataballs” (again, the proper pronunciation) that Gramma and Aunt Rita were fashioning for the holy feast a day or two later.

“Eat. Eat. Mangia. Mangia,” Gramma would say, just after we all exchanged hugs and she began walking around the room with a plate filled with meataballs.

“Oh, Emmy, you look so skinny,” she’d say to my Dad, who, as far as I knew, was regarded as almost a god in that household. “Dotty notta feeda you?”  My mother’s sharp eyes held her reply.

Dad was the oldest child. Rita was the second-youngest. Baby Sam, who lived in Placentia, California, did not make it home for the Easter feasts.  Frances, the one in age closest to my Dad. would come by the next day to join in the marathon cooking sessions.

That next day was turned over to cooking and meataball sandwiches. Mom (who was not Italian, but who had learned the recipes from her mother-in-law and actually was a better cook) would join in with Frances, Gramma and Rita in getting the big meal ready. “Dotty, you notta feeda my Emmy?” Gramma would “tease.”

For Dad and Uncle Al, who was my Godfather and the nicest man I’ve ever known, it was a day of errands and reminiscing.  They’d drive around Buffalo and talk about high school football glory and life in general. Bloody adventures in WWII that they could and would only share with others who had been embraced by that bloody horror that they shared in the Pacific Theater.

That day likely came with a stop, go to the end of Folger and take a right, at the Como Bar, where the barkeeps would give me and Eric ginger ale. And there were stops at 158 Folger, where the men and the boys would grab stray meataballs from the platter in the kitchen and disappear back down the stairs.

Easter, of course, would begin with mass at Our Lady of Victory National Shrine and Basilica or at St. Joe’s Cathedral. I honestly don’t remember much about them, other than that they were ornate.  Later in life, I’d visit the cathedral or basilica again for funerals of many of the people in this remembrance.

On Easter, this year, all years, I mentally revisit those holidays, when everyone was alive and happy and the food plentiful. My favorite was the beef braciole. But ravioli, spaghetti, meataballs, bread, rat cheese and other forms and flavors of cheeses, peppers and I’m sure some other vegetables were on the table.  Oh yeah, and the huge bowl and ladle for the gravy (what you Americans call “sauce.”)  

And a fat bottle of all-ages wine. Kidding. Gramma didn’t let the kids enjoy the wine, though she knew Mr. Conte likely had when we visited him. By the way, I may have my age wrong in the anecdote about the wine and sausage fest with Mr. Conte, but I definitely was not legal age to be consuming alcohol anywhere other than in the Italian sections of Buffalo and Lackawanna.

Someplace in photos and Kodak movie film that I don’t possess, there are pictures of my brother and me after mass.  Dressed in overcoats and little fedoras, we were two gangster slicks at a park in the city that had a lake or a reservoir. Our parents were just letting us work off some energy after we saw the Easter Bunny, so we each got sticks and began flailing away at each other, like 6-year-old and 8-year-old Zorros or Errol Flynns.

All things must pass, and these dueling matches usually ended with my brother, getting pissed off at my swordplay, chasing me and attempting to beat me. My mother decided we’d worked off enough energy and took the swords away and broke them over her knee. We all got back into the car and went back to Folger Street.

Perhaps Dad would then take Eric and me to his Uncle Johnny’s house, where the kind, old gent would give us shot glasses of brown whiskey.  Dad and his Uncle would laugh at our gasping reactions and pour themselves another. “You boys-a wanta another?” Uncle Johnny Ghianni would laugh. I, at 10 or 12, had not developed the taste for whiskey that could have killed me in my own 30s or thereabouts. Should have, I’d wager.

One of our pre-Easter days was the one mentioned at the top, when Dad and my Godfather drove us out Abbott Road from Buffalo’s Folger Street to Lackawanna, where they parked at Uncle Al’s house. Then he and Al led us across the side yard to the house next door.  We could smell the frying sausages from the back door.

Uncle Al, who was a mechanic on the railroad, hugged his dad and said “Emmy (my dad) and I will be back in a while.” I sense they needed some bar time. Or just wanted to get away from all the damn children and women.

Me, Eric, Ronnie and Robbie then sat down on chairs near the table where Mr. Conte was frying sausage and filling up our milk glasses with Dago Red. He may have made this magic elixir. I know his brother, my grandfather Sabatino Ghianni used to make 30 gallons at a time. More than likely, though, Mr. Conte got it at the liquor store or from a neighbor.

If I remember correctly, wine and age make that unlikely, my Uncle Al’s brother, also named Al Conte, dropped by. A mechanic by trade and just about as nice as his brother, he was either Albert or Alfred and Uncle Al the other. Alberto and Alfredo?

But everyone calls my uncle’s brother Nini. I say “calls,” because he is a Facebook friend. I think he’s still with us. I’ve only seen him a couple of times in my life, but he has commented on posts I made on Facebook about his dead brother or about his late nephew, Ronnie, who died too young of a heart flaw. I always told Ronnie he was my favorite cousin. I have to admit I’ve used that same line with other cousins. It always was true when I said it.

Late in Ron’s life, I remember visiting Buffalo and smoking and drinking Scotch with him. He was a helluva guy.

Al and Fran didn’t stay in the house next to his dad forever.  They left the cottage in a grove of cherry trees and above-ground pool in back and moved farther into the suburbs to a split level. Aunt Fran liked her new house with the plastic-covered furniture. And she was proud to tell me that her neighbors, a few doors down and on the other side of the hedge, were members of the Bonnano Crime Family.   Good people, as long as you kept extra cannoli in the house. I would guess there was no need for Neighborhood Watch. Block parties could get out of control with all the gunfire, I reckoned. Leave the gun, take the cannoli … or something like that.

Of course, on Easter, we all enjoyed each other, with Gramma’s dining room table spread as far as it could go and card tables at the end.

Every Easter I think of those holidays. Oh, that sword-fighting in the park with the reservoir. My Gramma and her unbroken love and badly broken English.  The Italian cheese-a-cake or cannoli after the pasta plates were cleared.  That cheese-a-cake was different than what you’d expect. It actually was like a bundt cake baked around a cheesy, ricotta center.

I still mourn that all of the people around that table, except for me and Robbie, are gone. 

Robbie actually escaped Buffalo and moved to Houston many decades ago to be a teacher. He and Noreen raised their family there and now have a string of grandchildren, I think.  We have spoken each time someone from those Easter tables has died.  

And I always think about Mr. Conte pouring me my third glass of Dago Red and using a fork to put another sausage on the plate.    

My brother, Eric, and Ronnie finish off their glasses and wait their turn while Robbie grabs a piece of rat cheese.

I hold out my glass for a refill.