[skyguy79]

Originally Posted by skyguy79

I'm 100% Italian with all grandparents having come here from Italy. As I read through the posts in this thread, I found statements that I found amusing; statements that indicate what they think justifying the usage of the term they think is correct. The most glaring and humorous was one that read something like... It's gravy because it's on the label of a jar. I won't say what I think of that reasoning. I've even read in an internet article where a chef explained the difference by stating that if the pasta is wet and not throughly drained, it's called sauce because the gravy was diluted. But if it's put on a drained bed of spaghetti, pasta or whatever you wanna call it, it's gravy. Another bright explanation!

Now is there really a correct term? Well basically you can call it whatever you want. Right or wrong, nobody's gonna stop you from using the term and neither is really 100% correct. The real issue is what is really the more appropriate term? One simple test is to do a Google search on the exact terms and see just how many hits you get on each. I did just that and here are the results:

• "Spaghetti Gravy: 22,700 hits
• "Spaghetti Sauce: 4,550,000 hits

With Sauce having 200 times more hits than Gravy, I think there is a clear winner and that it's by far the more "appropriate" term to use if not the "proper" term. Supporting that is the fact that if you check the definition of both terms, you'll find out that gravy is a form of sauce while there is no mention of sauce being a form of gravy.

I have never ever heard of using the name gravy for topping spaghetti or pasta by any member of my now departed past generations. In fact I don't remember when I even heard it used for spaghetti or pasta for the first time, but it wasn't in my youth. Gravy was as others have indicated a sauce to use on meats, poultry, stuffing, mashed potatoes etc., but not for topping spaghetti or pasta. Matter of fact my familia frequently used the Italian term of Sugo (pronounced Zugou) for spaghetti sauce which technically covers both gravy and sauce as well as juice and essence. We even called the end cuts of the Italian bread "Cula" (pronounced Gulah or Goolou) meaning "A**" in Italian. The Cula was my favorite, but I'm not gonna tell you what I did with it!

It seems this thread has no end in reincarnations, so I thought I'd bring back the post I made some time ago. My only comment to add to that post is... anyone can call anything what they want whenever they want, but when the Google figures are so overwhelmingly in favor of sauce, and the poll results supports sauce, and having never ever heard of term gravy being used instead of sauce in my Italian family, well, that's good enough for me!