A bit of Santa Rosa food history comes to the fair

Take a look around the Hall of Flowers at the Sonoma County Fair and try to spot several dozen large, perforated aluminum pots.

There's a bunch of them at the north end of the hall. They're stacked three to five high beneath the birdhouse mobile, and they're overflowing with vibrant flowers and other gorgeous plants.

Where would you guess the metal baskets came from, and what do you suppose they were originally used for?

A hint: The great pots -- 50 in all -- were donated to the fair by a retired food producer, Gino Canevari. You might reasonably surmise they were used in the making of ravioli, as the Canevari family sold its first batch of the delectable stuffed pasta in Santa Rosa in 1929, and Canevari's Ravioli remains on the market today.

But you'd be wrong.

Nobody loves the ravioli first made by Attilio and Maria Canevari more than their son Gino, who's now 88. But decades ago, he left ravioli-making to other Canevaris and turned to producing something classically American.

Potato salad, as much as 2,000 pounds a day.

"I was a very ambitious person," Canevari said at the home near Spring Lake he shares with Sharon, his wife of 68 years. When he first detected a demand for potato salad, he had no idea how to make it.

He had learned the food business from his parents, who introduced ravioli to those Sonoma County residents not fortunate enough to have grown up on it. Attilio and Maria Canevari came to Santa Rosa from San Francisco in 1924 and five years later began selling local markets the ravioli they made in a commercial kitchen they created in the garage of a rented house on West Eighth Street.

As soon as each of their four children -- Pietro, Albina, Gino and Edwin -- was old enough to chop or stir, the kid was put to work making the ravioli sold first at friend Charlie Traverso's store, then at other Italian markets and restaurants throughout the county.

Little Gino's task, starting at about age 7, was to peel garlic.

"I hated my job, I always smelled of garlic," he said.

He was 14 when his parents expanded the business in 1939, building Canevari's Ravioli Factory and Delicatessen on Lewis Road at Humboldt Street. First-born son Pietro joined the enterprise, then Gino, and the sales territory swelled into Oregon.

As much as Gino Canevari liked ravioli, he said, "I was always looking for new products to put on the market."

He developed tamales and a pizza that could be sold in grocery stores. His favorite warm-it-at-home product was a bell pepper stuffed with Italian risotto.

The problem, Canevari discovered, was that all of those handmade foods were so labor-intensive he couldn't make a decent profit from them.

He remembers the Friday night in the late 1950s when he and his father were sharing some wine, French bread and cold cuts at the end of the workday and were talking business.

Attilio Canevari mentioned that when he had gone into Santa Rosa's Ninth Street Market to deliver ravioli, the owner asked him, "Where can I find potato salad?"

That was enough for Gino Canevari to decide he would offer to produce potato salad, even though he really didn't know what it was.

He asked his Irish-American wife if she would whip him up a sample. She did, using steamed potatoes, Best Foods mayonnaise, pickle relish, celery, pimento, boiled egg and a spritz of vinegar.

Canevari then made a larger batch, filled 18 one-pound containers and offered them to the proprietor of the Ninth Street Market. Canevari recalled, "He said, 'Yeah, put them in the deli case.'"

Canevari dropped back by two or three days later to find all of his potato salad had been sold. The grocer told him, "Next time, bring me 24."

Gino Canevari moved aggressively into potato salad, leaving the running of the ravioli business and deli to older brother Pietro. It later passed on to Ed, who expanded it with a catering service before selling Canevari's in 2011.

In 1959, Gino Canevari moved his potato salad operation to a commercial kitchen he designed and had built on Barham Avenue. Constantly modernizing and increasing production, he had 60 aluminum baskets custom-made by friend O. Wade Lux Jr.'s Lux Metals.

Canevari filled the pots with potatoes and placed them in a 12-foot-long pressure cooker. To keep up with demand from stores, military commissaries and other clients throughout Northern California, he sometimes made potato salad all day and all night.

A really big break came in 1969. One of his distributors told him that the owner of a fast-food restaurant was in a bind because a shipment of potato salad hadn't arrived.

Canevari quickly filled the gap. He said he then made a pitch to the man who owned that franchise and 14 others, saying his potato salad was better and less expensive.