My wife and I were recently discussing regional differences in cooking and cooking styles. She is from Upper State New York while I am Texian and southern all the way.
The exact disagreement was about sauce for pasta. She cooks a VERY Italian style sauce that is very much tomato based with lots of vegitables. I, on the other hand grew up with sauce being mushroom based with a LOT of meat included.
I begin with a light rue.....then add cream or milk and once thickened add mushrooms, onions and garlic. I also like black olives and lots of basil in my sauce (which I guess is sort of Italian).
She starts with crushed or cubed tomatoes, tomato sauce and lots of weird vegitables like bell peppers and zoo-keeny......but does include garlic, onions and mushrooms. The main difference is that she adds sausage chunks as a meat.....and not much of that. It's more of a vegitable mix with a hint of meat flavor......while I tend to include ground meat, cubed chunks of meat, sausage and chunks of salt pork to mine (more of a meat sauce with vegitable highlights).
Just wondering if this is a regional thing (as I contend) or is just a family thing as she thinks. My family is a group of serious carnivours......but I think it's because we had a severe shortage of Eye-Talians in East Texas.
After all.....we don't put tomato sauce over our chicken fried steak either.......like some I know.
