Photograph by Paul Wesley
Michael Gerome with sausage
Michael Gerome makes homemade sausage at Gerome's sausage in Fairless hills.
by Diana Cercone
It was in the late 1890s when Pierino and Rosina Girolamo said good-by to their families, leaving their hometown of Ascoli Piceno in Italy, and headed for America. Among the few items they took with them were the family recipes they grew up with—each imbedded with the tastes and aromas of their home and village. The recipes, in particular that of sausage, a specialty of the Marche region where the couple’s town rested, would prove more precious than the others in preserving their family’s heritage. For of all the recipes, the one for their family’s sausage, a tradition begun more than 100 years earlier, would come to mean building a legacy in their adopted land that continues today four generations later.
It’s a few weeks before Easter when I first step into the tidy and inviting store of Gerome’s Sausage Company (the family had changed their name once in the U.S.), set in a small shopping center in Levittown not far from the Oxford Valley Mall. As I enter, the sweet scent of pork and garlic portends a sausage-lover’s paradise. Taking customers’ orders from behind the glass sausage case are Michael Jr. and Tim Gerome, while their dad, Michael, Pierino and Rosina’s grandson calms a regular customer’s panic over an impromptu brunch for her growing guest list. Making her laugh, he reminds her, what a great cook and hostess she is. With her spirits bolstered, she leaves, her arms loaded with Gerome’s sausage as culinary insurance.
Michael is a robust man, with strong hands, a tender heart and a penchant for making jokes. As he leads me to the sausage-making area behind the storefront, he points to the framed photograph of his grandparents hanging above the sausage counter and next to a map of Italy. His grandparents, he says, first settled on a farm in West Virginia where they made sausage from the pigs they raised. Later the family moved to Bensalem and opened Gerome’s Market in the 1950s, where they continued to make and sell their sausages.
“Ever since I can remember—maybe from the age of four or five—I was helping out,” he says. “In between chores, I did my homework on the [market’s] counter. When older, I began helping my dad make the sausages. I liked to kid my parents that it was because of them that the child labor laws were passed,” delivered like an Italian Henny Youngman, with impeccable timing.
Child labor laws or not, so well did Michael master and enjoy making sausage that when his parents closed their store in 1995, he continued making it for family and friends in his home. There was only one problem: His circle of friends kept enlarging—and with it the demand for his sausages and a store of his own. In 2007 he obliged and opened Gerome’s Sausage Company in a small center about a half-mile down the road where, on the eve of his first-year anniversary, a fire from the store below engulfed it in flames. Six months later, on Good Friday, he and his sons opened at its present location.
From his family’s original recipe, Michael and his sons have expanded their sausage menu to offer more than 20 varieties—like sun-dried tomato, asiago cheese and fresh basil; potato, bacon and cheddar cheese; and chorizo, made with four types of fresh chiles. “I let them come up with their own flavors,” he says. “I gave them creative license and told them ‘As long as it tastes good, we’ll go with it.’ For the roasted garlic, rosemary and potato sausage, I thought of my grandmother’s Sunday roast pork, studded with garlic and rosemary and surrounded by potatoes. I came up with that to honor her. Tim came up with the Greek sausage, made with spinach, feta and kalamata olives, and my wife likes to takes credit for the broccoli rabe and sharp provolone.”
To finish reading this article go to page 134 in the Summer 2012 issue of Bucks County Magazine.