On the spaghetti trail....

My family is of English/Irish/Scottish descent but making a good homemade pasta tomato sauce is one of those seemingly simple but ultimately challenging cooking tasks--like the perfect roast chicken.

A third generation Italian-American tries fo track down the recipe for her mother's sauce.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/dining/21sauce.html?em&ex=1172293200&en=76258841bd3df3ef&ei=5087%0A

To understand why I made my sauce the way I did, I needed to start closer to home, with my mother. She has been making spaghetti sauce for almost 60 years, from a recipe she learned from her mother, who had been making it with American ingredients since the early 1900s.

and

Getting a recipe out of my mother is like trying to get a 4-year-old to explain what happened at day care. She’s not one of those annoying and cagey matrons of the kitchen who build their power by dangling the promise of a secret ingredient that will never be revealed. She just cooks by hand, so she’s never really able to articulate every step.

Great story and included in a sidebar are recipes for the sauce and meatballs.

 

Really, the ingredients are going to be very similar in any recipe. I like making this in August with the most sun-warmed fresh tomatoes. I make a lot of it and freeze it.

A couple things I do that seem to make a difference.

1.) I let simmer for at least five hours.

2.) Roasted pork neck bones seem to work best.

3.) Some people use wine. I use an Italian fruit condiment of cooked grape must, which is the unfermented stuff of which balsamic vinegar is made:

http://denigris.it/eng/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36&Itemid=64

 

Oh yeah. Be sure to carmelize the onions and peppers.

 

Frank,

When I used to make my own sauce, I'd always include carrots and celery as part of the base.

I used to grow three types of tomatoes including roma (plum). They make the best sauce because they have the most pulp.

A good basic recipe is in that old 80's standby The Silver Palate Cookbook.

Some people add a bit of milk to their sauce to counteract the acidity of the tomatoes.

I like the roasted pork neck bones.

 

Yes, I do this sometimes at the end if the sauce is too acidic. However, if you carmelize the onions and peppers, the natural sugars the process brings out usually will mellow the tomatoes. Of course it varies from batch to batch because each load of tomatoes will be different, even from the same farm, depending on how much sun they got and at which point of ripeness they were picked. Thus one must tinker toward the end.

 

Like I said, it's like roasting a chicken.

It seems like a simple task --which it is--but you're always playing with techniques for the PERFECT roast chicken.

 

I do. I don't peel the tomatoes, either. But then I cook the sauce a lot longer than most people do and that stuff tends to dissolve.

Out of season, I use Redpack unpeeled crushed tomatoes.

 

I take out the seeds but don't usually peel the tomatoes because I'll put the sauce through a food processor at the end--not to puree it but just to breakd down the carrots and celery slightly.

 

My mother, who is Irish but learned from my father's Italian mother, would put all this stuff in a pot and I remember they would use neck bones and it would seemingly take forever to make. We always got excited when spaghetti was for supper, but it took so much work that we would be lucky if my mother would make it twice a month - this was in the 60s and you probably didn't have stuff where you could preserve the sauce as easily.

 

Sorry...as a second generation American-Italian, the carrots and celery have no place in any type of pasta sauce.

And let's kill this right off the bat: it's sauce, not gravy!

Gravy is for roast beef.

 

"Heh, come over here, kid, learn something. You never know, you might have to cook for 20 guys someday. You see, you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it; ya make sure it doesn't stick. You get it to a boil; you shove in all your sausage and your meatballs; heh…? And a little bit o' wine. An' a little bit o' sugar, and that's my trick."