Bird Eye Soup, Independence, Louisiana

"I have an Italian Sicilian heritage that comes from my great-grandmother and great-grandfather, who came over from Sicily and immigrated to the United States to Independence, Louisiana. Where there is an Italian community, lots of relatives in that city. And the recipes that were passed down were bird eye soup.

There's no written recipe. It's not really made with bird eyes. It's made with a small Italian pasta. It's pretty much a vegetable soup made with leftover bones if they had when they cooked and vegetables. The other recipe that they passed down was how to make bread. They measured it in a pot, the flour. And you have to use cake yeast. And it was originally cooked in an outside oven. And I have one great-aunt still living, who is going to teach me to make that bread next time I go home. And the last thing that we ate was what they call gravy. Which really is what we call spaghetti sauce. And the secret to cooking that is actually to put quite a bit of sugar in it and you also had to make hard boiled eggs to put in it and potatoes as well as meatballs. And I have the gravy pot at my house."

Asset ID #7385