Beer and Soda for Sunday Dinners

Growing up, most Sundays were spent at my grandparent's house for dinner. If you're Italian, you know what those Sunday dinners were like: big family gatherings with salads, bread, and all that great stuff that came out of the Sunday sauce/gravy pot. I'm talking meatballs, sausages, bracioles, big hunks of pork, all that great stuff was always in the pot. The sauce/gravy was served on pasta, of course. For our family, that pasta was usually spaghetti, rigatoni, shells, or sometimes ziti.

To help wash down the incredible food, there was plenty of beer for the adults and soda for the kids. (We called it "soda," not "pop.")  There was wine too. Home made red wine my grandfather made in his cellar. Wine served in those big one-gallon glass jugs like they put cider in.Oh yeah. There was also soda water, the kind that came in spritzer bottles like the ones the Three Stooges would have soda fights with.

The beer was always Ballantine beer. Ballantine was one of the biggest brewers in the US. They were founded in Newark, NJ, in 1840.  And the soda was always White Rock-- Orange White Rock soda. It was always orange soda and, to this day, whenever I'm eating an Italian Sunday-style dinner, I still want orange soda with it.

I live in California. We don't have White Rock here. Leastwise, not that I know of. If we did, that would be the brand I'd buy to go with those Italian meals when I have them. White Rock, by the way, began in the late 1800s  as a bottler of mineral water from the White Rock natural springs in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Sometime later, they began bottling not just soda water from the spring, but flavored sodas like White Rock orange.

Ballantine beer and White Rock soda came in quart-size glass bottles that were worth a nickel each when they were empty. My cousin and I always grabbed the empties and walked down to my grandmother's nephew's roadside stand -- where he sold and served sandwiches, beer, soda, and more to travelers heading up or coming back from Lake Sebago and other places of interest up Seven Lakes Drive in Rockland County, New York -- and we turned them in for the coinage. Course, we then bought candy with our profits so Bats, my grandmother's nephew, almost immediately got the money back he just gave us. My grandmother made the meatballs for Bats' meatball sandwiches so you know they were good!

Those were the days, my friends.

Here's a pic of what was once Bats' roadside stand. I snapped it when I went back home for a visit last November.  It's now a small restaurant and bar called Sterling Station.