keith car works sagamore ma. factory town

The unofficial centre of town life was Louis’ Market, built in 1914 to keep this community of labourers supplied with imported arborio rice, dried pasta, olive oil, cornmeal for polenta and Italian cheeses. Incidentally, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Cape Cod or the American image of Cape Cod, but most of what I’m describing would have been totally invisible to tourists who came from all over the country to visit what they thought was the ‘real’ Cape Cod of whaling museums or artist colonies. At the same time the women would be making savor, a tradition that goes back to Roman times, where you boil down grape must with other fruits for days, to make a super-concentrated preserve that was many peoples only sweetener in the days before sugar. There was a grape arbour in every backyard, and every year, the men crushed the grapes and bottled their own wine. Many raised their own chickens, rabbits, and even pigs, and they would hold pig-butchering and sausage-making sessions in the autumn just as they remembered from their Italian homes. Someone was always harvesting something, from early spring to late autumn - tomatoes, basil, white peaches, squashes. They found which of the old-country crops would grow in the new home, a much colder climate. They had the time and money to plant beautiful vegetable gardens and fruit trees. They created a world for themselves, a little Italian melting-pot based on the ways of the country districts where they had grown up: Their food was a combination of memories and new inventions – also influenced by pros¬perity some of them couldn’t have dreamed of in Italy. So the immigrants communicated in a kind of made-up Italian using words from all their separate backgrounds. You probably know that people from different regions of Italy can be divided by dialect to the point where they have trouble understanding each other. I’m leaving out a lot of earlier local history here, including other job opportunities that started attracting Italian labourers long before 1910 - I want to concentrate on the core group of Italians who founded their own little society in Sagamore Village. One contingent, including the Carafolis, came from the vicinity of Bologna. Among them were thousands of Italians who stayed on after the canal was finished to find permanent employment with the biggest local business, a company that manufactured railroad cars. Construction workers poured into the Sagamore-Sandwich area, many coming almost directly from Europe, lured by the prospect of work. The idea was to dig a canal between Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards Bay and open a shorter water route to Boston from points south along the Atlantic coast. Shortly before 1910 a huge construction project was started on what we call Upper Cape Cod, the southern part where the Cape joins the mainland. But before we go further I’d better introduce the village. It was what connected me with our village and part of my parents’ world. The first way I learned to fill in part of what was missing was through cooking. Everything in my life belongs to Before or After.

I was almost twelve years old when my mother, my maternal grandmother, and one of my two brothers died in a terrible fire from which I barely escaped. But the second break with our family past may be the reason I’m here today. One - the break between two continents - might have been something I could put in the back of my mind and only think about occasionally. There’s a Before, and there’s an After.Īs a third-generation Italian-American from the town of Sagamore Village, Massachusetts, I experienced this gap of memory in two ways. People whose families came over from Europe may be almost completely cut off from knowledge of anything earlier than some dividing point when another generation reached America. In the United States we call ourselves ‘a nation of immigrants.’ One thing that this means for us is that there’s often a gap, a break in family memories.

Presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery

Keith car works sagamore ma. factory town