Every recipe tells a story
I'm happy to share our Italian cooking secrets. The food's spicy and good for you. And, yes, the people are a bit crazy.
I come from a long line of superb cooks. Grandma emigrated from Calabria, and cooking was the only language we shared. My mother continues my training. Here we're at a family feast in Idaho, where she grew up. That's Grandma below in the bib apron. 
Whenever we feel blue or homesick, we get a big pot of sauce bubbling on the stove.
My mother and Grandma cooked on the family farm, with flavorful stewing hens, gamey pigs, grass-fed cows. They made their own pork sausages, cheeses and prosciutto.
To recreate their sauces with our less-flavorful meats, I add seasonings (don't tell my mother). A splash of red wine, a pinch of red pepper flakes, maybe a bouillon cube.
Like the cooks of old, I keep testing with a scarpetta, a scrap of bread. A wonderful fragrance of warmed tomatoes, garlic and oregano fills the air. Who could feel sad after that?
For the sauce
She added the spices gradually, rubbing them between her fingers, as you see above, careful never to overwhelm the tomatoes. In Italy, the tomato is king.
So what about the green herbs. I remember Mom sending out to the backyard when I was little to pick parsley, growing in a moist bed right next to the hose. She used oregano too, fresh or dried. I love the oregano that grows wild now on the Idaho farm, after all these years, but whenever I transport it to Seattle, it dies.
Mom herself likes basil but "not as much as some people do. If I have it, I use it."
Like Grandma, she adds her herbs one pinch at a time. Her sauces have a deep rich flavor, never sweet like canned sauces.
1. For quick sauce, Grandma would start with a little bacon, not pancetta, but the wildly flavorful salty bacon they made on the farm. If you don't have bacon, then just use olive oil instead. Chop an onion and saute it in the oil. Add a can of tomato sauce and a can of tomato paste.
When mom makes this sauce she,uses stewed tomatoes. She puts them into the food processor for a little bit; "keep them a bit rough." Sometimes she uses tomato paste, sometimes not.
"If the sauce is too thin, then, sure, add the paste. Or if you want to make a lot of sauce, same thing."
I've love the lusty undertone that tomato paste adds. I recommend the Cento brand. Conserva, a kind of tomato paste imported from Italy, is lovely if you can find it.
2. For your meat sauce, use chicken, pork or beef. Brown it in oil (Grandma used lard). Don't use onion, Mom says, the flavor will come from the meat. Add a little water to the pan, put a lid on it and steam. Add tomato sauce, pepper etc.
Mom says, "Grandma never added wine or any of that stuff.
All this stuff they add nowadays. She tasted the sauce and if it was
sour, she put a teaspoon of sugar in there. But only a teaspoon." Cook the sauce for maybe 45 minutes, so it doesn't have a metallic taste from the cans in which the tomatoes were stored.
"I don't know why people think they have to cook it for hours and hours," Mom says. "The old people had to cook on wood stoves, so it made sense then."
I had an Italian friend in Boston who'd married into another Italian family. Her husband wanted her to cook the sauce until it turned black around edges. "That's a big problem," she said.
Me, I've always wondered if farmhouse wives kept the sauce on the stove for so long for company. Think of that cheerful red color, the comforting bubbling sound and the windows steamed up. Think of the tasty meal and colorful family sure to appear at the end.
My mother has seven children, each of whom cooks variations of the sauce. I, for instance, have nothing against onions.
Naturally, we all think our version is the best. That's what it means to be Italian.
To recreate Sunday dinner at my grandmother's house, visit my blog Italian Woman at the Table.
