Cooking Up A Holiday Tradition With The Sun City Texas Italian Club

By Ernesto Berturand


It is commonly thought that love is sometimes conveyed through creating food and the Sun City Texas Italian Club isn't any exception to this rule. For every holiday period the practice of fixing homemade Italian sausage is a motive for the Italian club members at Sun City Texas to join together inside the VFW building in Georgetown. It is there that they season the pork with the help of spices, garlic cloves and parsley and grind it for filling into the sausage casings.

For around five years the Sun City Texas Italian club women and men have respected this amazing family custom. Despite the fact that they originate throughout the United States each will thinks back to his or her youth when ever they would see fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers joining together to produce sausage each and every year right after Thanksgiving and just ahead of Christmas time.

With a manual meat grinding machine bolted on the dining table, family members would each take turns rotating the grinding machine to help make the sausages that had been uniquely seasoned by each individual family. The home kitchen was almost always rich in scents, a hustle and bustle, flavor testing and good fun. It is definitely an old custom in Italian households all across Italy that has transferred over to this country even today. In Italy, the butchering of pigs for the purpose of the preparation of holiday sausage was regarded as and still is seen as a community celebration as well as a valid reason to get together and socialize with relatives, friends and neighbors.

What a delicious tradition the making of sausage is! The sausage made by the Sun City Texas Italian Club members is only available to members for purchase. This year the group made close to 150 pounds of both mild and spicy varieties. The sausage-making group consists of mostly men and one woman who cleans the intestines used for sausage casing and chopping the onions. She also cooks lunch for the 20 men involved in sausage making.

The Sun City Texas Italian Club was organized 8 years back in an effort to get men and women of Italian heritage all together and also involve those who have an affection for Italian culture. The club at present consists of close to eighty men and women. The membership gets together routinely for cooking lessons. Recollections associated with family ways of life transported from the old country, menus and everything that may have been handed down family to family members is the main reason why the Sun City Texas Italian Club gets all together every year to make Italian sausage.




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