I remember my Mimi (Dad's Mom) making it and my mother. Family lore also recalls Effie's (Grandma O'Bannon - Mimi's mother) sauce and, maybe, Mama Grace's. Though the same "recipe" each tasted just different enough that you would know whose was whose. Mimi always made homemade meatballs to go with it and would dump the meatballs and their drippings right into the sauce. Mom's had meatballs, as well, but the drippings were drained first. My Dad is the spaghetti sauce connoisseur. Anywhere we go that has spaghetti with red sauce, he tries it. And, no matter the price of the dish or celebrity chef who made it, every time he says, "This isn't as good as your mother's."
By the time I started making the sauce, meatballs were never involved. Though "homemade", the sauce always called for canned tomatoes & canned mushroom "pieces". This never seemed strange to me (growing up in the decade of the canned vegetable), but as I've gone more and more natural in my eating it was the one thing that always bothered me.
My Mimi swore by the canned tomato. She ate them straight from the can. And, later in life, when she discovered Emeril Lagasse on the cooking channel she would use no other canned tomato than the one he used - Muir Glen Organic.
Canned mushrooms were easy to eliminate; that I did years ago. But, in the past few years canned tomatoes have really come under fire as being one of the worst possible canned vegetables. I'm not sure why, but I always thought replacing canned tomatoes would be difficult. I mean, they have to be SKINNED and SEEDED, people! THAT can't be easy!
I was wrong.
Today, I made "the sauce" without canned tomatoes. It was SO easy! You just remove the tops and put an "x" in the bottom.
From there, you put them in boiling water for just a minute or two until the skin starts to peel off...
From here, the skins practically fall off!
....voila!
I'll never go back to canned tomatoes again!
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