food: Isa's sauce

[substitute]

I am making spaghetti sauce. The recipe is a family one from before my birth, when my parents and big brother were living in Bologna. My brother's nanny, Isa, was a pretty serious cook.

It's a bolognese sauce of course, but I am making it with fake meat, so it's a nolognese, or perhaps spaghetti and neatballs.

The ingredients aren't any surprise: tomato, onion, spices, olive oil. The part I don't see so often is carrot, which is shredded or pureed and added for sweetness. This means that I don't have to add salt or something sweet to cut the acidity.

If I'm doing it for vegans or nondairy folks I omit Isa's last step: a tiny amount of milk at the end.

Comments

[amicablebitch.livejournal.com]

i'm glad to see there are carrots in an authentic sauce.

my stripper-in-law claims that spaghetti sauce shouldn't have carrots. she says carrots are apparently something you put in when you don't have anything else to put in. she of course directed this comment at my mother's spaghetti sauce, which has carrots in it (and is a very old recipe that she got from someone else). now i can be like "well, ACTUALLY..."

i really didn't care one way or another about the carrots, they never bothered me. but i don't take well to her acting like my mother's spaghetti sauce is SO wrong, and acting like that reflects badly on my mother (when it wasn't even her recipe). and just in general she always acts like she's an expert on everything, when she's actually pretty dumb about everything.

that's of course more information than you care to know.

[substitute.livejournal.com]

Italian-american food is one of those things where everyone assume that their own family recipe is THE AUTHENTIC ONE. I just like this one. It did come from an actual Italian, but I hear there are several of those!

Also I like the phrase "stripper-in-law."

[eris-devotee.livejournal.com]

wow, your stripper-in-law is a n00b. There are as many ways to make pasta gravy as there are towns in Italy.

[amicablebitch.livejournal.com]

yeah. i'll never understand how someone who failed out of college somehow determined they were an expert on everything.