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Marinara: Making the Perfect Pasta Sauce
Plants & Gardens News Volume 13, Number 3 | Fall 1998
by Elizabeth McGowan
My favorite lunch, when I was a kid, was something my mother called "Irish spaghetti"—elbow macaroni slathered with ketchup and smooshed with butter. In my house, this dish was a staple, as much a part of our mealtime repertoire as peanut butter and jelly and fish on Fridays. This, of course, wasn't something you necessarily wanted to broadcast in the largely Italian neighborhood in which I grew up. Indeed the practice of mixing pasta with ketchup was, to my Italian-American girlfriends, akin to sacrilege, a skeleton to be hidden in the closet, an admission of culinary barbarism—which I discovered at the tender age of ten when I made the mistake of inviting my Italian-American schoolmate, JoAnn DeLucie, over to my house for lunch. Horrified by the greasy pink pasta headed toward her plate, JoAnn feigned a tummy ache and headed home to the safe harbor of her mother's kitchen.
In the traditional Italian household, I was beginning to learn, mom's marinara sauce was sacrosanct—nobody made sauce like your own mother made sauce (and ketchup, of course, was beneath recognition as a food item at all). Insulting one's mother's sauce was the same as insulting one's mother; transgression of this unspoken code provoked, I'm sure, more than one schoolyard fight.
The importance of the Sauce to the Italian family identity became even clearer to me as I entered my teens and started keeping company with the Al Pacino types I fancied in high school. Inevitably, after a few dates, I'd be invited home to the boyfriend's house for Sunday dinner, where mealtime lasted for hours, and I'd meet the whole extended family, who told me I ate like a bird, while sizing up my suitability as a bride. The matriarch of the household would take one look at my Irish face and shepherd me into the kitchen to learn how to make the Sauce, the only sauce that could ever make her son happy. In this exclusively female sanctum she revealed the secret ingredient (basil, two pinches of sugar, three bay leaves, fennel, only Vitelli tomato paste, whatever) of the recipe, which, I was invariably warned, took the better part of a day to prepare.
Today, unlike their mothers, none of my Italian-American friends slave over the stove cooking sauce, or anything else for that matter—JoAnn these days would live on take-out if she could. Most are too busy with jobs, kids, houses. Extended family dinners are now relegated to holidays—and mom, who has become grandmom, brings the marinara.
But the concept of the Sauce endures, its myth (and recipe) handed down to the baby boomers, who still insist that their mothers' version is the best. The nostalgia attached to this tradition revealed itself again recently as I sat in on a political campaign planning meeting. The candidate was an Italian-American Democrat, a lawyer and mother of two, running in a staunchly Republican district. The meeting was a strategy session to get the Italian-Americans in the district out to vote. Ideas included a flyer revealing the candidate's marinara recipe. Predictably, the candidate vetoed the suggestion, preferring to run on her record—and went on to lose the election. Would the Sauce have won the day? We'll never know. But it's a good bet her mother thinks so.
Elizabeth McGowan is a former editor of P&G News.