All the gravies I know of are either beige or some shade of brown. Apparently, Italian Gravy is red and something most of us would simply call Pasta Sauce or Spaghetti Sauce.
Lesson learnt.
Sunday gravy is a tomato-based sauce with meats, called that because grandma would make it Sunday afternoon.
My father’s father immigrated from Italy when a young man. They are spaghetti with spaghetti sauce and meatballs to us. Pasta wasn’t even a word I heard growing up. I never heard it called gravy inside our family and only found out a decade or so ago that some people in New England call it gravy. To me, gravy will always be flour and meat drippings.
Okay, just learned that calling it gravy is not an Italian tradition, it’s an Italian-American tradition for some. Italians came over and were trying to assimilate quickly and the word gravy involved meat and sauce, so some opted to use gravy thinking it was more American. I know my grandfather told my father something like, you’re in America, you speaka da English. His accent never disappeared, but he spoke English and made sure his pack of children did too.