Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Pasta sauce.....regional???

My Mom's family is from Chieti. A small town called Polutri, to be exact. When I was a kid, and everyone was able, we'd grow about a hundred tomato plants. We'd pick the tomatoes, cut an X in the bottom of each one and dunk them in boiling water. Peel them and dice. Use a funnel and dowel and stuffed chopped tomatoes, basil, and sliced garlic into Pepsi bottles. We boiled them for 3 or 4 hours and put them up.

For sauce, put a little olive oil in a pan and cook a couple diced garlic cloves. Add about a half a diced onion and cook a little. Add the tomatoes and cook for 2 or 3 hours on low heat. You can use as is or add (as my Grandma did) a pork chop or couple ribs.

Today, we use Rinaldi or Hunt's sauce. In the same manner, start with olive oil and cut up a couple garlic cloves, a half an onion, and cook down. Add the sauce and a handful of chopped basil. That's it. I dilute this to make pasta [bleep] with ditalini and cannellini beans, add hamburger for meat sauce, or go full tilt and add meatballs and grilled sausage. Whatever.

My home town is full of Italians. The American Legion I cooked at for 12 years was all Italian, and never have I ever seen tomato sauce with vegetables in it. Ever! That's got to depend on where you're from.

Our big foods:
Stuffed artichokes (made yesterday)
Escharole and cannellini beans
Broccoli Rabe and Italian Sausage
Italian Sausage and roasted potatoes
Frittatas, mostly egg and potato
Pasta [bleep]
Chicken and Eggplant Parm.
String beans and potatoes with tomato sauce
Cod fish and potatoes
Pasta with red sauce or garlic and olive oil
Stuffed peppers
Polenta with mushrooms and Italian Sausage.

I don't know if that points to a region there.

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.

I'm right with you Pizan...desendants from near Palermo Sicily

All I know is I use Hawkeyes' recipe and I ain't changing for nothing or nobody. My oldest daughter who continually got sick when eating pasta sauce from every recipe I had ever tried, does not get sick when she eats Hawkeyes' recipe. It's versatile, not complicated or expensive to make, and more importantly it is DELICIOUS !

In our area the Italians sauce is always tomato based. They also use chicken, ribs or steak to cook in the sauce. The meat is later taken out and eaten on the side. It is also called "red gravy" not sauce. I don't know where the local Italians came from, but they came to work in the iron ore mines of the Upper Penninsula.

Long

Thanks, Miss Lynn.

Okay---Post it up!!! Please.

Well, there's two of them, but I think I gave Lynn the hour simmer sauce.