Here’s the only canned tomato sauce recipe you will ever need:
2 cans (28 oz each) peeled plum tomatoes with juice
4 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
1 tbsp kosher salt or sea salt
2 tbsp sugar
6 tbsp (3 oz) extra virgin olive oil
½ c (packed) fresh basil
Boil and stir, crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pot until the mixture is the consistency of thick tomato sauce, approx. 1.5 hrs. Pour into sterilized cans, add 1 tbsp lemon juice per pint, and sterilize in a canner for 20 min.[1]
Here are some things I scavenged from Hamburger Hill after its next-to-last inhabitants left:
- 1 pair closed-insulation BOGs boots, size 12 (my size);
- 1 roll-up tape measure;
- Misc. fasteners and small hand-tools; and,
- 2 (104 oz) cans peeled plum tomatoes with juice
I clipped the tape measure to my belt, washed the boots in Clorox, vinegar, baking soda, hot water and sunlight, and put the tomatoes in my car. The first batch of this summer’s tomato sauce was made with them.
Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York, and I recently went in together on a 2004 double-wide on a corner lot that had been abandoned by the old lady who had previously lived there. Mike tracked her down in an old-folks home in Rome. She said that she would sell the place for two grand because, if she sold the home for more than that, she would lose Medicare benefits. $2,000 for a home like that is a steal. Mike asked me, ‘Would you like to go in on this together?’ I said, ‘Sure’, before I had fully considered the accounting implications.
Inside, the home was as bad as they get. Cigarette smoke damage, cut-open pillows and mattresses, children’s toys, clothes, a filing-cabinet full of paperwork dumped onto the floor. Holes in the sheetrock from the old lady’s younger brother, who had an anger management problem. The fridge and stove were full of perishable food that had begun to mold over and attract flies. The pantry was stocked with bags of beans and lentils, cans of tuna fish, boxes of macaroni and cheese, dry pasta and – wouldn’t you know – about two gallons of stewed tomatoes. Mike said, ‘My cat can eat the tuna fish’. I said,
-I’ll take the tomatoes.
-Have at it.
So, I pulled the car up next to the door of the home and piled what I could into my trunk. One of the neighbors asked what I was doing and I said, ‘An old family recipe’.
-I’ll bet it tastes good.
-It does. But it’s not my family’s recipe.
I have written previously that gravel has terroir. Each gravel pit is different because it can only yield what is underneath it. My tomato sauce will now come out in vintages. The first batch of this summer was Hamburger Hill, 2022. The second batch was Costco, 2022. I still have enough basil[2] in the garden to bottle a Jefferson County 8A 2022. This will be a great year.
[1] Nunzio’s Tomato Sauce, Loomis, The Italian Farmhouse Cookbook, 2000, 424. The sauce tastes better if you pronounce ‘basil’ [baezl], rather than [beyzal].
[2] Id.