Now everyone enjoys Dilworth's old family traditions
The Italian women who started St. Elizabeth's spaghetti dinner gathered for a photo in 1965, nearly 30 years after serving the first meal.
From left: guest Rev. W.F. Lemen, Mildred Kondelis, Marianne Costello, Rev. J.B. Gans of St. Elizabeth, Lorraine Oliver, Georgia Papile, Lucy Kondelis, Margaret Oliver, Christine Verdi, and Carmella Varriano. Courtesy of Carmello Varriano.
Josephine Bjordahl chuckles at the popularity of pasta today.
Ninety years ago, Dilworth's immigrants introduced the Red River Valley to noodles, which was such an oddity that schoolmates mocked Italian children for eating spaghetti and garlic.
"Look who's eating it now," laughs 86-year-old Josephine, an Italian woman known in Dilworth for her homespun catering.
The city's culinary history became synonymous with spaghetti when the Italian women began cooking for The Feast of The Lady of Monte Carmelo, an annual religious celebration held from 1912 to 1942.
"Where Italians are, so is spaghetti," the Moorhead Daily News wrote in 1932 about the celebration.
The women served the spaghetti dinner at Sunnyside Grocery Store in Little Italy until Father J.B. Gans suggested moving the meal to St. Elizabeth's Catholic Church in 1939.
This year, the church will celebrate its 60th anniversary of the tradition, but now the meal draws 2,300 people on the last Sunday in April and October.
Parishioners take three days to prepare the meal that uses 750 pounds of hamburger, 500 pounds of spaghetti and a sauce created from 108 gallons of tomato sauce, 54 gallons of tomato juice and 36 gallons of tomato paste.
"I'll ask, 'Can't I make roast beef or roast turkey?'" Josephine teases. "No, I have to make spaghetti."
She creates the dinner's salad, which includes chunks of oranges, peppers and green onions. "Everybody wants my recipe. It's all in my head," says Josephine, giving a common answer from the Italian women to recipe requests.
Josephine has gained a reputation for making meatballs and sauce and baking cookies for others from her home.
The cookie catering started after she baked sugar cookies for the old Silver Spike Restaurant in Dilworth, where she worked for 23 years.
"One man said, 'You think you could make me some of those big white cookies?' After he started that, everyone knew," she says. "Now at Christmas - I didn't even get my cards out this year. Everybody was bothering me for cookies, angel food cakes and banana bread."
Decades ago, the women of Little Italy baked in outdoor brick ovens that the neighborhood shared. The ovens - large enough for the cooks to crawl inside - baked a dozen six-pound loaves at a time, with leftovers sold to the town's non-Italians.
The Italians also made wine as a group, with a truckload of grapes arriving in the fall to make a year's worth of wine.
"Mr. Poliseno would get his grapes the first weekend, and everyone would go over and help," says Marie (Verdi) Bedore, a lifetime resident of Little Italy.
The Italians would fetch wine - called "dago red" by outsiders - from the barrels in their basements whenever company arrived.
"You couldn't leave their house without having wine," Josephine says. "Kind of like the Norwegians when at their house you have coffee."
Most of the Italian families had elaborate gardens of red peppers, Italian fry peppers, tomatoes, escarole, eggplant, onions, fava beans, Italian lettuce and more. They sprouted the seeds in a "hotbed," a homemade greenhouse with seeds scattered in a pit and covered with storm windows to retain heat, Marie says.
While families often made the same dishes, most tweaked them a bit differently, often with fierce allegiances to their methods.
Tony Altobell used this chart to order pasta for his grocery store in his home in Little Italy from 1932 to 1940. Courtesy of St. Elizabeth's Catholic Church
For instance, Marie and Laura (Altobell) Costello still roast bushels of red peppers under broilers each year, but differ on the proper method.
Laura seeds her peppers before roasting and peeling them and seasons the finished product with only garlic and oil before placing them in jars. Marie seeds them after they're roasting, convinced that locks in flavor, and tosses the peppers in oil, fresh parsley, garlic, salt and sometimes herbs before packing them to be frozen.
As foreign as these Italian culinary customs once were to the Red River Valley, Josephine was just as bewildered by local food favorites.
"All my sisters married Italians, and I married a Norwegian," Josephine says. "Mrs. Nelson taught me how to cook Norwegian, like cabbage and dumplings. I didn't even know what lutefisk was until I married a Norwegian."
Pasta e Fagioli (pasta fa-ZHOH-lee), or Pasta and Beans
By Josephine (Boit) Bjordahl
This favorite dish was called informally "pasta fazool," and this is Josephine's informal recipe. Most believe the leftovers taste even better.
Heat 2 cups of cooked navy beans with salt and pepper to taste. Add any or all of the following: chopped onion, chopped celery, chopped parsley and a few slices of chopped bacon.
Prepare elbow macaroni according to the package directions. "You take a big kettle and you get little tiny pasta," she says. "Throw in, ummmm, about three cups, according to how big your family is."
Heat an 8-ounce can of tomato sauce.
Drain the cooked pasta and place on a serving dish. Top with the beans, then the tomato sauce.
Serve immediately or keep heated in a pan in the oven at 300 degrees, stirring occasionally.
Spaghetti Sauce
By Carmella (Altobell) Varriano
Carmella, now 90, was born in Italy but moved to Dilworth as a 2-year-old. She was convinced to write down her spaghetti recipe in 1967.
1 46-ounce can tomato juice
1 12-ounce can tomato paste
1 can water (using tomato paste can)
3 tablespoons parsley
2 tablespoons basil
1 tablespoon rosemary
1-2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 teaspoon black pepper
3 teaspoons sugar
1 tablespoon salt
Mix together. Add browned meatballs to sauce. Also add pan drippings from meatballs for extra flavor. Simmer for at least two hours. Serves 10.
To serve: Cook and drain 2 pounds of spaghetti according to package. Place a cup of sauce in the bottom of a large pan. Place spaghetti on top of sauce. Place another cup of sauce of top. Sprinkle with 2 tablespoons of grated Romano cheese. Toss lightly with a fork or spoons. Put spaghetti on serving dish. Cover with sauce, and place meatballs on top. Serve with grated Romano cheese and crushed red pepper.
Meatballs
By Carmella (Altobell) Varriano
2 pounds ground beef
1/4 pound ground pork
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 eggs
1/4 cup oatmeal
3/4 cup soft bread crumbs (moisten, then squeeze out excess water)
3 tablespoons parsley flakes
1 scant teaspoon sweet basil
1 clove garlic, minced
3 tablespoons Romano cheese, grated
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
Cooking oil or lard
Mix ingredients by kneading. Shape into meatballs the size of a golf ball. Brown meatballs in fat in skillet until well-browned. (Fat should cover meatballs by three-quarters.) Place in spaghetti sauce.
Makes 10 servings.
Braciola (brah-chee-OH-lah),
or Italian steak
By Josephine (Boit) Bjordahl
"Buy a great big steak" - that's about a 3-pound beef round steak.
Pound with a meat mallet until thin and cut into three or four long pieces.
Dilworth Timeline
(continued)
1912 Frank Fiandaca and Tony Altobell begin a 30-year
tradition celebrating The Lady of Monte Carmelo. The religious celebration imported from
Italy included outdoor Mass, fireworks, an all-girl wrestling team, the Dilworth Italian
Band, mule riding and Italian food vendors.
1917-18 The national flu epidemic kills 13 residents as doctors and nurses provided by the railroad convert the Dilworth School into a hospital.
1918 A brick school built for $39,000 was "entirely modern in every respect," including drinking fountains, flush toilets and steam heat. The old school is used as a meeting hall for years until it was razed.
1922 The Village Council bans plank sidewalks in favor of concrete because they are "causing a constant complaint of being dangerous to public travel after a short time after construction and causing the Village Council constant trouble and annoyance."
1922 Dilworth native Billy Petrolle begins his 11-year professional
career. Nicknamed "The Fargo Express," Petrolle entered the ring with a colorful
Indian blanket over his shoulders rather than a robe. He was named to the international
boxing hall of fame in 1962.
1922-23 Railroad shop and maintenance workers walk off the job over pay cuts, and the strike divides the town.
1925 The school builds an east wing to add high school classes, and the first class graduates the next year.
1932 Mildred Barone and Louis Costello become the first Italians to graduate from Dilworth High. Discrimination among the immigrants included discouraging Italians from attending school beyond elementary grades.
Funzy Oliver grooms "Old Man" Raphael on Oct. 10, 1939. Residents sometimes knew
people by only their nicknames. Funzy and Margaret Oliver couldn't think of Raphael's
first name, but said he owned the first meat market in town. According to city voting
records, it appears his name was George.Courtesy of the Olivers
1932 Frank Alphonse Oliver, better known as Funzy, begins his career as a barber. He
insisted on preserving the past, keeping the same checkered floor, leather chairs with
porcelain arms and other vintage equipment throughout his 60 years in Oliver’s Barber
Shop.
1934 Residents, councilmen and bar owners clash over the 3 a.m. closing time for taverns, three hours after neighboring cities. Some say the late hours give the city a bad reputation.
1936 Dilworth becomes one of NP’s 30 car-icing stations. Ice was cut on Detroit Lake, hauled to Dilworth and loaded onto produce cars.
1939 St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church begins hosting its annual spaghetti dinner, with Father Gans reluctantly allowing men in the kitchen to carry the heavy kettles of sauce. Sixty years later, male cooks outnumber the women.
1940 Mayor W.G. Coover lives up to his campaign promises by cracking down on nightclubs only 10 minutes after taking office. Bar owners are charged with selling liquor between midnight and 8 a.m. and permitting dancing on Sunday.
1942 After 30 years of Italian celebrations, the Our Lady of Monte Carmelo festival ends as the male organizers are drafted for the war.
1947 Famed burger joint Hi-Ho Tavern opens, with the name borrowed from Hi-Ho crackers. In 1978, the restaurant begins offering the Hi-Ho special - a hamburger, fries and a pop for $1.50 - only on Tuesdays.
A bulldozer pulls Old 1068 from the railyard to the
park on an an enormous wooden sled built by railroad workers.Catherine Fitzgerald Special to The Forum
1956 "Old 1068," a retired steam engine built in 1907, is saved from the
scrap heap and moved to be displayed in what is now Whistle Stop Park on Highway 10.
1957 Arlo Brown is elected mayor, serving a total of 28 years and helping turn the village with gravel roads into a modern city.
1962 Earl Listul opens Earl’s Super Valu, specializing in authentic Italian ingredients like ricotta, prosciutto, 30 kinds of pasta and his homemade spaghetti sauce. He stays in business nearly 30 years.
1965 The Dilworth Boy Scouts create Loco Daze, a weekend festival to honor the city. The first celebration includes steam locomotive rides, a crazy hat contest, a parade, square dances and a greased pig and turkey catch.
1969 The city starts a $1.6 million project to pave roads and improve water and sewer systems after two years of debate about the project.
1970 After a debate about the location, residents vote 207-88 to put a retired railroad depot in Whistle Stop Park. The depot was renovated into a community hall.
1971 Archie’s Place, a discount store in a distinctive red and yellow striped building, opens on Highway 10 between Dilworth and Moorhead. The name changed to Bargains in 1990.
1971 Arlo Brown reclaims his seat as mayor after being ousted four years earlier in the controversy over paving the city’s streets.
Culverts wait to be installed as part of storm sewer
improvements in Little Italy. Stan Thurlow Special to The Forum
1979 The city funnels $1 million into Little Italy by improving houses, streets and
sewer to the neglected neighborhood. Twelve of 27 homes are repaired and five are torn
down, including the boyhood home of Billy Petrolle.
1981 Citizens vote 336-231 to spend $225,000 to build the present Community Center and Fire Hall.
1986 The railroad, now merged into Burlington Northern Santa Fe, tears down what remains of the original 45-stall roundhouse at the Dilworth railyard.
1988 The city revives Loco Daze, 13 years after the last celebration.
1989 After years of discussion, voters approve spending $280,000 on a community pool by 273 to 186.
1990 After a decade of dormancy, Orchard Estates housing development begins to blossom after 37 lots were tax-forfeited and sold at auction.
1991 Wal-Mart opens after Dilworth beats Moorhead in a courting contest over the retailer. The discount chain will expand the city’s tax base by 13 percent.
1992 The first house is built in Kroshus Estates, a new housing development catering to Dilworth’s new image as a bedroom community to Fargo-Moorhead.
1994 The Dilworth and Glyndon-Felton schools consolidate after sharing some services for three years.
1995 The 1918 brick school is torn down as part of a $5.5 million construction and remodeling project at the Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton elementary and junior high school in Dilworth.
1998 Bargains, the store that led business development on the once-vacant stretch between Dilworth and Moorhead, announces plans to close.
Sources: The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead; Moorhead Daily News; Red River Scene; Dilworth City Hall records; Clay County Historical Society archives; "Welcome to Dilworth: The Largest Railroad Village in Western Minnesota"
