Bona Casa Foods rolls out its pasta for 50 years

Cumberland restaurant makes its sausage, sauce from scratch too

June 24, 2007

The work starts early, especially for owners Rick and Randy Church. By 2 a.m., they're mixing doughs and getting everything ready.

Longtime assistant manager Don Donatell arrives by 3:45. An hour later, the whole dedicated crew of pasta pros - some 15 veteran employees - has gathered to craft vast numbers of tricky noodles.

Each week they make about 10,000 super-plump ravioli and countless "cavatills" - cavatelli in standard Italian - which are short, shell-shaped plugs of pasta dough.

Sure, Bona Casa's pasta team has mechanical help: large mixers; a rolling machine to ease the dough into its proper thinness; and four hand-cranked cavatelli makers that a friend who excels in welding stainless steel helped to link and motorize into one insatiable pasta press.

But the cavatill dough still must be hand-cut just so into thick, long ropes, then fed by hand to the machines - a process that takes several team members four straight hours. And each of the 10,000 ravioli must be carefully hand-filled and closed, pricked with forks, cut to separate, gently placed into the cooking water, simmered, removed, drained, cooled, inspected, packed or wrapped, and then refrigerated or frozen.

Astonishingly, Bona Casa has been making pasta like this for 50 years.

The restaurant exists thanks to Anna and Tom Ricci, descendants of some of the first immigrants from Italy to Cumberland in the late 19th century. Anna began selling her tomato sauce from their basement in 1957; the Riccis eventually built a small restaurant on farmland southeast of the city.

Bill and Joan Church bought the business in 1971, learning Anna's recipes by heart and teaching them to Rick and Randy, their then-teenaged twin sons. Rick jokes that Anna's recipes are still "all in our heads" - nobody's ever written them down. The boys took over in 1983; in 1994, they built a larger restaurant next to the original one.

Pasta is not the only thing prepared from Anna's recipes. There's excellent lightly cured sausage scratch-made from fresh Wisconsin pork shoulder, spices and natural casings. It tastes like good Canadian bacon with soft background tingles of black and red pepper.

Anna's red sauce is a classic Italian-American tomato "gravy": smooth and mild, comforting, and just thick enough to coat pasta perfectly. Tart, sweet and salt are in pleasant tension; there are barest hints of garlic, black pepper and parsley and - very unusually - no sugar or oregano.

If you get the ravioli - and you should - you'll have a choice of two mild fillings: moist combinations of herbs, eggs, mozzarella cheese and either raisins or finely chopped morsels of chicken. Most people like one or the other filling best. Jeff leans toward the raisin, Audrey toward the chicken, but we always end up sharing with - or poaching from - each other.

We have three bits of advice for first-time diners at Bona Casa:

(1.) Stick with house-made. Raviolis, cavatills and sausage are one-of-a-kind creations with proud roots in Southern Italy and the Wisconsin immigrant experience.

Bona Casa's purchased spaghetti noodles, though of good quality, are far less interesting. When asked about the factory-made pizza crust, one of the restaurant's superb waitresses said simply: "Pizza is not our forte."

The meatballs, also factory-made, don't come close to the quality of Bona Casa's sausage. They feel oddly rubbery in the mouth and have a bitter, garlic- powdery edge.

(2.) Order family style, but with modifications. Family style brings you all the important dishes on the menu, in this order: salad, pizza, pastas - all with red sauce, breadsticks, sausage and meatballs, spumoni, cookies.

But here's a problem: If you eat the pizza before the pasta, the subtly flavored ravioli fillings and red sauce will seem bland. Bona Casa's pizza sauce, also house-made, is far more strongly flavored, with garlic, fennel, oregano and probably sugar. So have your pizza delivered after the pasta.

Here's another problem: Too much of Anna's good red sauce on too many dishes means monotony. So order creatively: Get red sauce on your spaghetti, with a side bowl of extra sauce, but order your ravioli plain or sauced with melted butter only and toss immediately with Parmesan cheese to taste.

Get your cavatills with Don Donatell's delicious new house-made Pepperjack White Sauce, a kind of neo-Italian-Northern Midwest spin on Alfredo, with spunky Pepper Jack cheese.

(3.) Get more pizzelles. Order family style, and you also get a scoop of luscious spumoni ice cream and an elegant Italian cookie for dessert - house-baked by Rick and Randy's mother, Joan. Called pizzelles - the "zz" is pronounced like "ts," the cookies have beautiful pressed patterns on both sides, a delicately crisp and shattery texture and the lightest of sugar-cone-caramelly tastes.

You can buy a dozen to go for $1.75; we always do. But take it from us: You'll be all crumby when you get home.

Main Course, the Leader-Telegram's restaurant review column, runs the fourth Sunday of the month. Diners' Notebook, a sampling of favorite restaurant offerings, runs the second Tuesday of the month.

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