My Grandmother’s Tomato Sauce

I’m always looking for good tomato sauce recipes because we eat a lot of pasta.  After I try one, I go back to making the same one, over and over again, because it’s easy.  My sauce is ready in a half hour, and it’s fine.  But it’s lacking.

I’ve never found a pasta recipe that I like as much as this sauce my grandmother made for me one weekend when I was visiting during graduate school.

It was the best bowl of pasta and tomato sauce I’ve ever had.

I remember that she used Pomi chopped tomatoes in a carton, but then I sat down at the dining room table and I didn’t watch anything else she put in the pot.  It was the most incredible bowl of pasta I’ve ever had, and I think about it all the time.  I’ve never been able to recreate it.

Someone linked to a Marcella Hazan sauce recipe in the middle of the week, so I decided to try making it Wednesday night; just another sauce in a long line of sauces that would probably be fine, but I’d go back to making the easy sauce afterward.  This one took so long and it had so much butter and the onion thing was plain weird.  But what the hell; I’d try it out.

And it was my grandmother’s sauce.

This sauce is the sauce that has been inside my brain for 20 years, the sauce I’ve always kicked myself for not nailing down the recipe with her before she died.  I got to eat my grandmother’s sauce again.  And it had so much butter in it.  Like so. much. butter.

I got to taste it again on the sort of week when I miss her a lot because I can’t buy a Mother’s Day card for her anymore.  But I got to call my mother and tell her that I found it; I found THE sauce.

I like to think that maybe my Internet-unsavvy grandmother somehow guided the universe into dropping the recipe onto my screen right when I needed it.  Thank you, Grandma.  I’m not going to make it too often because did I mention the butter?  But it’s going to be the recipe I pull out when I need to feel close.

Mother’s Day is a hard day for so many people, whether due to infertility or loss or death.  If you want a good comfort dish, this is it.  Or leave your own favourite comfort dish recipe below so someone else can grab it.