When legendary Sixer Bobby Jones was inducted recently into the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame, he reminisced fondly over the city’s old-school red gravy parlors: “I loved the Itallian spaghetti in Philly,” Jones told Billy Penn.

The account prompted a reader to write to me: “What is ‘red gravy’ spaghetti, and can you let us know if any of these still exist in Philly?”

Those of us who speak fluent South Philadelphian know this is, most simply, the local term for red sauce. On a deeper level, though, “red gravy” also refers to a way of life for a city with Italian roots that reach back to the late 1800s when immigrants settled into the rowhouse neighborhoods of what became the Italian Market. Their simmering tomato pots — “gravy” with the addition of meatballs, sausage or braciole — perfumed the air with a gusto that would define South Philly’s iconic Italian-American cuisine for a century.

The old neighborhood is now undergoing dramatic transformation, and our Italian menus overall have evolved considerably since the early 1980s. But luckily, there are nonetheless still several places keeping the red gravy tradition alive — well enough that the “Secretary of the Defense” could easily relive his old Sixers spaghetti days.