SAUCE OF THE EVENING
Since I was a child in the forbidding wilderness of Hollis, Queens, my Italian grandmother would make the same sort of marinara sauce every Thursday, and it quickly became known as “Thursday sauce”. It’s an incredibly simple preparation, and by the time I was in high school, I would eat a double bowl of it every time she made it.
I will warn you: you have to like garlic. This isn’t one of those “wave half a clove of garlic in the general vicinity of the ingredients” kind of dish. I don’t think it’s overwhelmingly garlicky, but A) I was raised on it and B) you use whole cloves of garlic; garlic gets stronger the smaller you cut it. Nevertheless, there’s still plenty in the sauce. I am apparently of the genotype that, essentially, sweats garlic; my dad (not from the Italian side) would complain that I reeked of garlic after eating the aforesaid double bowl, and all the tooth brushing and hand washing in the world could stop it.
Without further ado, let’s get on to the
RECIPE
- 1 can (28 oz.) tomato puree OR 1 can (6 oz.) tomato paste plus 2 canfuls of water*
- 1 head of garlic, separated into cloves and peeled
- 1 or 2 tbsp. olive oil (you don’t have to break out the extra virgin for this)
- Salt
- Black pepper
- Red pepper flakes (optional)
- An egg or two (very optional)
- Grated/grating cheese (see below)
In a small saucepan, heat the oil until it shimmers. Fry the whole cloves of garlic in the oil until they blister and turn brown (but not black!). If you’re frightened of garlic, you can remove the cloves at this point and just use the flavored oil, but why would you do that?
Add the tomato puree (or paste and water) carefully, since you are adding liquid to hot oil. Stir to combine, salt and pepper to taste; let it come to a boil (which shouldn’t take long) and then turn down the heat to low and let it simmer, mostly covered (tilt the lid), while you prepare your pasta. When the pasta is done, the sauce is done. Add a couple spoonfuls of the sauce to the drained pasta and stir it around. I like to plate it by adding some sauce to the bottom of the bowl, adding the pasta, covering it with more sauce, and then grating cheese over it. The cloves are soft (not quite roasted-garlic soft) but still pungent, so only eat them if the person you may be smooching later likes garlic too.
If you’re feeling spicy, you can add some red pepper flakes near the end. If you’re feeling fancy and/or Sicilian, you can poach an egg in the sauce. It’ll take about 7-10 minutes to poach, but it really only takes about 15 minutes to cook anyway. Crack an egg or two into the sauce and completely cover the pot if you decide to go this way. (My grandfather loved this, and would request it usually about once a month. I was never a fan, but I offer this in his memory anyway.)
For pasta I prefer rigatoni (mezzi rigatoni if you can get them (I haven’t seen them in years)); my grandfather preferred mafalde, but I usually won. For cheese, a nice Locatelli is good, but a ricotta salata is best if you can track some down.
–c
* This only makes 18 oz. of sauce, and I remember it going farther than that, so maybe use 2 or 3 cans of paste and 4 or 6 canfuls of water? I can’t ask my grandparents — they’ve been dead since the early 2000s — but I called my mom and she assures me the proportions, at least, are correct.
NOTES
If you don’t already know how to peel garlic in a hurry, watch this video. I didn’t know this trick until maybe 10 years ago, so it was far too late for my grandparents to use. I remember my grandfather sitting at the snack bar and peeling clove after clove of garlic and storing them in a jar for my grandmother to use later.