Maybe that's why I wandered out to the kitchen aimlesslessly a little while ago. I was tired but it was only 11 AM, and I was searching for something but I didn't know what. That's when I know that I really need Home Food; it may not fix everything but it sure makes me feel better while I figure everything else out.
The Home Food that is simmering in my kitchen right now is my mother's recipe for Red Gravy. This is the recipe that I wrote up for it this spring:
Red Gravy
So I've been wishing and wishing for a really long time some really good spaghetti sauce.....but nothing, absolutely nothing, available was what I wanted. What I wanted was my mother's "red gravy".....and what I remembered was that it somehow seemed complicated and I thought I couldn't make it. Besides, I didn't know where the recipe was anyway. Seemed kinda hopeless. Then I found it in an old photo album that Mother turned into a recipe book (some recipes that she always used along with a lot of other slightly-fancier-than usual recipes that were just wishes) back in the early 70's.
The original recipe was told to Mother by one of her co-workers in at D. H. Holmes. (Mother was assistant manager of Ladies' Better Ready-to-Wear at the Lake Forrest store in New Orleans; she loved that job.) Seems that the co-worker had married a guy from Italy, and his mom was sending the family recipes across the pond to the new wife so the guy could have some good old world home food. And his home food became our home food by way of three recipes (red gravy, meatballs [to-die-for but I can't eat them now because I really would, veggie me], and pasta en tiana) that we had quite often.
I was a bit worried when I put this together today. Beyond the fact that I was out of both olive oil and garlic (I used some sort-of-acceptable substitutes--gotta work with what you have and I didn't have the cash for the real stuff), there was also the fact that the recipe calls for cans of this and that. Well, the recipe is over 40 years old and can sizes have seriously changed on so many items. No matter. I forged ahead and all actually went well.....in fact, all went brilliantly. Home Food indeed!
Turns out that this is also lots less expensive than the store-bought spaghetti sauce stuff, too--comes in at less than $3 for 3 quarts (about 12 1-cup servings). Will definitely keep this on hand in the freezer from now on.
Here's the recipe in the original not-too-prosy prose (but with the typing errors cleared up--seems we didn't have white-out back then; oh wait, that's still old-school but, yeah, no auto-correct either).
1. Chop one medium onion and put it in cooking oil and a dash of olive oil. Saute onion.
2. Add 2 cans of tomato paste and fry a little.
3. Add 1 can of tomato puree, add water til the proper consistency.
4. Add garlic (4 cloves in whole).
5. Add 2 tablespoons sugar and 1 tablespoon salt.
6. Sprinkle ground cloves on top.
7. Sprinkle pepper on top. Cook at least one hour (simmer).
And there you have it: absolutely amazing sauce.
Now, since I mentioned the can size concerns, I used 6-ounce cans of tomato paste (which seem to be pretty much regulation size today). And I used a 28-ounce size can of tomato puree--oddly enough, this wasn't too easy to find in the store; they had tons of other canned tomato products but only one choice for puree hidden down on the very bottom-most shelf--one hopes that this is not a doomed product). As to the "water til the proper consistency," I added a couple of puree cans worth of water and then a little bit more after the sauce had simmered for about half-an-hour to thin it just a tad.
Don't know why I thought it was complicated--maybe it's because she always made those deadly-good meatballs with it. Anyhow, I didn't even miss them today.
recipe re-made by me, Sidney Walker, currently happily full of red sauce (I had it on rice.....yeah? so what? It tasted fantastic.)
March 25, 2015
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