I remember an old cast aluminium pot, handed down from my grandparents. It was pockmarked, with a patina of polymerized oils in the depressions. It once served as a pressure cooker that exploded in my grandmother’s kitchen, so it no longer had a lid. The handle was loose and the bolt seized, making it a death trap when loaded with a hot sauce. This pot was mostly used for my mom’s frugal spaghetti sauce, which was a simple combination of beef, puréd tomatoes, and just a hint of oregano, salt, and pepper.
And when I say a hint of oregano, it was an almost homoeopathic amount of seasoning. I remember helping my mom move in the 1990s and packing up that oregano, labelled with a best before date from somewhere in the early 1980s. I opened the bottle and smelled it, and somehow it still smelled like my childhood.
The method my mom used for making her tomato sauce was to drop a 1 pound package of mince, which I imagine was a 70/30 mix of beef and fat. We bought or traded for a quarter of beef every year, and stored the paper wrapped in stamped packages in one of the two large freezers in our shed in the backyard. I don’t remember her adding fresh onions or garlic, but I’m pretty sure a teaspoon of garlic and onion powder made their way into the sauce near the end.
That pound of beef would cook down for half an hour or so, not to brown it, but so that it was safe to eat. A lot of the lore of the kitchen in the 70s and 80s was learned in the 60s, when over cooking meat was an important step in food safety. The result was a very softened, but somehow unbrowned mass of meat and oil.
A small amount of salt and pepper were added once the beef was cooked, along with a tall pint can of store brand tomato sauce. On a good day, we used Hunt’s, usually after a case lot sale.
We knew that the sauce was done when there was a thick slick of oil on top. By today’s standards this would be unappealing, and today I usually both use a lower fat beef mixture and emulsify the oil into the beef mixture. But back then, the fat was nutrition and normal, and the calories kept us fed and warm.
The sauce was then poured over overcooked house brand spaghetti, so that water pooled around it. We stirred it up and it was delicious for a hungry young boy, and it was cheap enough that I always had seconds. Occasionally we had shelf-stable parm to dust on top, which was heaven.
I remember eating spaghetti at my aunt’s house. She used green pepper, fresh onion, and (I assume) fresh garlic. I wasn’t used to the bitter and herbaceous flavour of the green pepper, but thinking back now I suspect it tasted better. I also remember having spaghetti at a friend’s house. They used more oregano, the fancy flaked style. Unfortunately the only thing I remember about it is that it was reheated in a space-aged microwave that had a big dial timer. It must have been good, though, as we always finished it quickly.