It's Not Just a Sauce

On recipes, legacy, and last names

10/3/21 - Journal Entry

Yesterday, Mom taught me to make the family pasta sauce. We call it sugo ¹—why, I don’t exactly know. I think it’s just the Italian word for sauce.*

I wish I could tell you that's what they properly call it in Italy, but aside from said sugo recipe, a collection of other recipes, a few furniture items, and some phrases mumbled enough times to commit it to memory, not much was passed down.

So this sugo is not just a sauce to me.

It's heritage.

Ancestry.

Honor.

Legacy.

A rite of passage.

Love.

It's my mom and her mother and her mother's mother and beyond.

Someone on TikTok pointed out that last names come from the father; therefore, women don't really have a last name of their own.

So for me, it's not just a sauce.

It's a name with no letters.

It's a medicine.

A memory.

A story.

Lore.

It's a symbol of connection to memories that aren’t my own.

While we might not, as women, have a last name that we pass down, we have food–nourishment–a story of the bond between us and the earth, whose essence gave us life.

Earth’s language is not a last name but a recipe that carries memories–cherished and celebrated with flavors that dance on tongues.

Her language connects us with abundance, bounty, gratitude, and honor.

Her language teaches us how to recognize and respect the body of the mother—earth, and our own.

Perhaps we need not a mother's last name because our existence is proof of our identity.

I am Jenna. I am human.

If our father’s last name came from an idea, then our mother’s last name comes from a feeling.

Perhaps a recipe is a language that can capture such a feeling, teaching us with our hands how to create with the heart.

The process is both inherent and inherited. Our mother's last name is one that is received and felt in the body.

A last name that is written in the way a tree writes its history through rings inside its trunk–it’s our DNA–like seeds that live in the fruit of a tomato that grows on a vine.

This sugo is not just a sauce.

It’s the closest I’ll ever get to knowing my great-grandmother, and her mother, and her mother's mother.

Just as people pass on a recipe, so too do they pass on history.

Women may not have a last name of their own creation, but that does not mean they don’t carry something else–a book without a title, their history written in the heart.

It’s not just a sauce—it’s an invisible, unbreakable thread that tethers me to the women who lived before me.

It’s not just a sauce—it’s the other half of my last name.

-j.m. shaffer

or should I say… j.m. sugo shaffer ;)

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I realize this is an older journal entry, but it’s one I return to often. Today, I want to share a piece that spilled through my fingers, It's Not Just a Sauce.

This day meant a great deal to me in the way only a rite of passage might. More than my first kiss, or first period, though those too are tucked into my breast pocket like precious stones too. This day was more of a life milestone, like my wedding day; it’s one of my most cherished moments in this lifetime. I hope the entry does it justice.

1. I can confirm now that sugo is sauce in Italian.