Grandma DeGeorge’s Spaghetti (tomato) Sauce
In Angelo’s words
Reminiscing the days of yesteryear or like my grand-kids would say, “in the olden days”, of course I correct them and tell them it was the “golden years”. Us kids would wake up on Sunday morning to the aroma of the spaghetti sauce simmering for Sunday dinner. Grandma would actually start the sauce the day before, made from fresh tomatoes, and garden picked spices, or fresh spices purchased at the Mohegan Market on Grant St. She would wash and mash the tomatoes through a colander collecting the juice and pulp in a large porcelain canning pot. I don’t know how big it was, I just know it was big. When she filled the pot with what looked like tomato juice, she would place on the stove and turn the flame on high until it came to a boil. While she was waiting for the pot to boil she would prepare her spices and dump them into the boiling tomato sauce. She would stir the sauce mixing the spices throughout the sauce thoroughly and then turn the flame way down to let it simmer all night.
It was next to impossible to sleep with that aroma flowing through the air, so naturally we would be up early. We would get dressed and go to an early mass and then back home again. As soon as we returned from church, she would get that apron on and return to the job at hand. She would make the meatballs and bracholi, brown them and put them in the sauce to cook for the hours before Sunday dinner.
Sunday dinner always included several courses, and always some form of pasta like spaghetti, or macaroni, and always preceded with a fresh tossed salad and followed by some sort of meat, potatoes and vegetables, and naturally it wasn’t a meal withour fresh Italian bread. Every Sunday was like going to Moma Leone’s in New York City. And, I can’t remember many Sunday’s when there was no company for dinner.
I have to be honest with you though. I’ve tried to duplicate her process and even starting my sauce on Saturday evening and having the flame as low as possible, if I didn’t tend to it for a few hours, I would wind up with a burned pot. All I could think is that poor woman just didn’t get any sleep that night. She was cooking when we went to bed, and she was in the kitchen ready for church when we got up, and she never burned the pot. Of coarse we would notice her head bobbing in church during the sermon from time to time, but we’re not sure if she was dozing off or nodding in agreement. We’re not sure because if we started to doze off we would get a slap across the back of the head.
Well, I already told you she filled what I believe to be a 20 quart canning pot with fresh tomatoes mashed through a colander and cook it down, that probably amounted to about ½ bushels of tomatoes from the garden. So if you have a garden fine, if not the modern day version of that turns out to be approx:
Recipe 1
Grandma DeGeorge’s Spaghetti (tomato) Sauce
All ingredients are approximate, as my mother and grandmother, never measured anything when cooking. And I unfortunately learned the no measure method. My children not wanting the recipe’s to die with me have forced me to add the approximate measurements to them. So feel free to modify the ingredients to your taste.)
Ingredients
Method
Instructions
- A variation of: Grandma’s fresh tomato sauce, as Angelo remembered it
- See also: Meatballs, in “Grandma DeGeorge’s Sicilian Style Meatballs and Ground Beef Braciola”
- See also: Pheasant Cacciatore, in “A Few of My Favorite Pheasant Recipe’s”
- See also: Meatballs, in “Grandma DeGeorge’s Sicilian Style Meatballs and Ground Beef Braciola”
- See also: Grandma DeGeorge’s Sicilian Style Steak Braciola
Note: The sauce be itself, without the beef or mushrooms is a great sauce. If you are using fresh tomatoes from the garden or market, you must use a sprig of fresh basil (2 – 3 leaves) to sweeten (cut the acid from the fresh tomatoes), and a sprig of fresh mint leaves.
Recipe 2
Grandma’s fresh tomato sauce, as Angelo remembered it
Title added by the archive. Angelo gave this recipe no heading.
Originally published as part of Angelo’s introduction to this post. Angelo described how she made it in his story, with no heading or list. The ingredients and steps below are his words, lifted from the first and last paragraphs of his introduction unchanged.
Family notes
None yet. Notes from the family will appear here, signed and dated, and kept apart from Angelo’s words.
From the archive
Restored · 2009 capture- Originally published
- , on angelobiondo.com by Angelo Biondo (post No. 40)
- Filed under
- Family Favorites, Pasta Recipes
- Restored from
- Internet Archive capture of — view the original page
- Also captured
- Transcription
Angelo’s words are unchanged, spelling included.
- No capture of the post’s own page exists; it is transcribed from the Family Favorites category page of April 2009, which shows it in full. The posting time isn’t shown there.
- The instructions were one paragraph; they are split into steps at sentence boundaries. No words were changed.
- The ingredient bullets are shown as a list.
- Grandma’s fresh tomato sauce is restored as a recipe from Angelo’s story. Its steps are his sentences, unchanged and in his order; its two ingredients are his phrases. His story is kept whole above it.
- Open questions
Left exactly as published, for the family to confirm.
- Grandma’s fresh tomato sauce: Angelo names “her spices” but not which ones. His note on the modern version says fresh tomatoes need “a sprig of fresh basil (2 – 3 leaves)” and “a sprig of fresh mint leaves”.
- The note on the ingredients ends with a closing parenthesis that has no opening one.