You may have to share that recipe! :)
I don’t think there IS a recipe - they did it for so many generations that they grew up learning it by a sort of osmosis.
When my FIL was alive, he would plant hundreds of tomato plants; and in August the entire clan would get together to ‘make sauce’. I think they canned 500 quarts in their peak year.
For ‘Christmas Sauce’, they use sweet Italian sausage, beef chunks, and pepperoni. Everything is ‘eyeballed’ - and husband says that if you don’t have the ‘Family Tomato Sauce’, it’s useless to even try :-)
They had the spaghetti and sauce at the noon Christmas meal; and in the evening they had home-made vegetable soup and hoagies.
On Christmas Eve: Pizza.
(This is all sort of wonderful for me - for at least a few days, we’ll be off the ‘Low Carb’ mania :-)
But I will watch on Christmas Eve, when he starts the sauce process, and be sure to relay any secrets!
Well, the Christmas Sauce is well underway, and here’s what I spied.
First of all, you can’t do this in exactly the same way, unless you have home-made sauce. My husband’s family always make their own, and it winds up much ‘looser’ than a jarred sauce that you will buy in the supermarket.
The Family make two kinds – one that they designate as ‘sauce’, which has herbs, onion and garlic in it; and one that they call ‘puree’, which only contains tomatoes, onion, and a little salt.
Husband uses the ‘puree’ for the Christmas Sauce; the value of this is that the original ‘wateriness’ of the sauce allows it to be cooked-down over a long period when used, so that the flavors of the added meats develop well; and then you season it to taste. If you try this with store-bought sauce, you’ll have to alter the seasonings, and cook it for far less time.
Today, he used six quarts of the plain ‘puree’ for these amounts of meat:
3 lbs. Chuck Roast, silver skin and excess fat removed, cut into 1-inch chunks.
3 lbs. Sweet Italian Sausage, also sliced into 1-inch chunks.
About 12 inches of a Pepperoni stick, sliced about ¼ inch thick, and then each ‘coin’ cut in half.
Brown off all of the meats in batches, in a big frying pan, starting with the Sausage - because that will need to cook longest.
Put 6 quarts of sauce in an 8-quart stock pot, add the seared meats, and put one or two ladles of the sauce in the hot frying pan, to scrape up all of the ‘fond’ , and add this to the stock pot.
If you are using store-bought sauce, you’ll have to determine and regulate your seasonings; but for the Family Puree, he adds
1 heaping tablespoon of dried Basil
2 tsps. each Dried Oregano and powdered or granulated Garlic
No salt – if needed, that comes at the end, and to taste.
Ours has been going for about five hours now, and we’ll turn it off at about seven hours. We’ll heat it thoroughly tomorrow, an hour or so before we are ready to eat.
Another thing that they like at Christmas is
Oranges in Sweet Italian Dressing:
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup red wine vinegar
½ cup olive oil
salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, dried basil, dried oregano to taste
Shake well to mix
Pour over oranges sliced ½” thick. Cut a slit in the rind of each round to allow easy separation. You separate the meat of the orange from the rind with your teeth – so this is a ‘hand’ food :-)
(that seemed sort of strange to me, but he says it’s ‘Finger Lickin’ Good!’. I imagine you could peel the orange before slicing, but he says that is NOT the Family Way!)
Merry Christmas to all,
JT