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 about five years the Sun City Texas Italian club members have kept this particular family custom. Regardless that they originate throughout the United States each will looks back to his or her earlier childhood days whenever they would delight in fathers, mothers, grandfathers as well as grandmothers joining together to make sausage each year right after Thanksgiving and just preceding Christmas.

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 formed eight years ago as a way to bring people of Italian heritage together and also include those who have an appreciation for Italian culture. The club currently has about 80 members. The group gets together often for cooking classes. Memories of family traditions brought from the old country, menus and everything that has been handed down family to family is why the Sun City Texas Italian Club gets together once a year to make Italian sausage.




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