This is the Life Force. “It’s medicinal,” my mother says. She is right. My cousin, Melissa, calls it “gravy.” My brothers call it “sugu.” We Lindquists call it, “red sauce,” (and if you’re my stepson, you insist that it’s “soup” and drink it from a thermos), but that’s just to distinguish it from “bolognese,” “meat sauce,” “summer sauce,” and from my Grandma Lanzafame’s sauce and from my Nonny Calvano’s sauce and from my own mother’s sauce… You can see why this is only Part I. There is a lifetime of sauce about which to blog. This is the most basic version and I entreat you to start your own sauce-making journey right here. But before we begin, we have to talk tomatoes.
If you are serious about your sauce, and I daresay you are or you wouldn’t be reading this, you are going to want to think about canning your own tomatoes. There just isn’t any other way to capture the true August-vine-ripened essence of the Fruit of the Gods.
This is my Elizabeth and my sister, Susanne, who comprised 2/5 of the canning team in 2015, pictured here with the product, as my mom would say.
I think we canned over 80 quarts that year. We are going to have to talk about the canning process in another post, on another day, because it’s JUST TOO MUCH to cover in one post about basic red sauce. But it had to be mentioned.
For now let’s just agree that when my recipes call for several quarts of canned tomatoes, you are going to know that you need to substitute cans of store-bought stewed, crushed, or whole peeled tomatoes. Don’t worry. I do it too, when I run out of the real stuff. I don’t think my Scandinavian family can distinguish… yet. But I can, and you will too, once you get hooked on the good stuff. Anyway, this recipe is good and simple enough to make up for most sins, it will literally “cure whatever ails you,” and should result in a consistent and pleasing enough result to keep you out of the bottled sauce aisle, permanently. Mangia!
