The Sunday before Christmas, Frank “The Sodfather” Balestri deftly scattered fistfuls of fennel powder, crushed red pepper, cayenne, paprika, salt, and Calabrian chile paste over 50 pounds of raw, coarsely ground pork butt and some sirloin. He splashed it with wine, then he and a pair of old pals, Ron Ranola and Phil Speciale, plunged their hands into the cold meat, kneading the spices into it and plucking out chunks of white fat.
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Speciale and Ranola grew up helping their grandparents with this tedious task, born out of the annual pig slaughter, when the weather was cold enough to safely preserve the meat. But they weren’t given much more responsibility than pricking holes in the stuffed casings to help press out air pockets. Over the years Balestri graduated to more advanced tasks, and he’s done it almost every year of his life. Now an evangelist of the ritual, he was showing the two how the rest of the process goes. He doesn’t grow his own peppers and herbs the way his grandfather did—he orders them online or buys them from J.P. Graziano on Randolph. But he still grinds his own meat four to five times annually.
And he’s taught dozens of people to make it—he says interest grows every year, even among those who didn’t grow up with it. Many enter his annual contest, which in its fourth year this October attracted about 350 attendees who waited impatiently in Park Place Countryside Banquet Hall for 12 judges to sample 40 presliced entries. Bill King of Wauconda was there—his sticks have taken second and third place two years out of his three. He holds a yearly supersod party attended by some 50 people. Last January he and his pals ground and stuffed 1,500 pounds of sausage. Two of those sticks from different recipes placed fourth and ninth.
Once the spices were mixed, Denise fried up a test batch and passed it around. This recipe was a bit of an experiment, a lot spicier than most—about how Balestri’s mother likes it—and relatively lean, at a 90-10 meat-to-fat ratio. “The old-timers like it fattier because they grew up through the depression and I think they don’t like to waste anything,” he said.
At the end of the long day the table was cleared and Denise laid out a fresh spread of mostaccioli with sauce, two preparations of Balestri’s fresh sausage (baked with potatoes and peppers and cooked in the gravy), two preparations of meatballs (in gravy and fried), salad, and bread, and the group sat down to eat.
