Sauce

I haven’t made a sauce but if I could I would make and authentic bolognese, which is my favorite, hearty and red and cooked down for many hours, making my mouth water all day long. I might actually sear a ham bone and cook it down until the meat and tendons and marrow melt into the oblivion of sauce.

It’s a big deal to make sauce. Italians I know say ‘I’m making sauce’ and then I accept that I wont see them all day or possibly all weekend. I get it. They’re making sauce, I will see them when it’s ready. Its often family recipes, or something cribbed together from online cooking blogs and ancient, fragrantly stained cookbooks. I haven’t made it so I am only speculating.

My favorite isn’t even homemade. It’s served in the Trump Soho Hotel, the fearsome electrified glassy tower I stay in sometimes in New York, the greatest of all the cities, when theres an expense account of some type and I don’t have to run to the corner deli for potato chips and bad headache inducing wine for dinner.

The room service will bring me a immigrant perfect rigatoni bolognese, the pasta a slight hardness to the tooth, big tubes of semolina flour and egg, filled to bursting with the best sauce I have had.

There will be a deeply verdant broccoli rabe, tiny curls of crispy onion on it. I’ll dump the vegetables right onto the pasta as well as all the cheese that I can beg from the hotel kitchen. There will be red pepper flakes on there too – more than I care to admit.

I will mix it all together and eat it with the smallest fork, like a fish fork or a dessert fork. I don’t care. I have no pride when it comes to this kind of late night hotel room eating. There are no witnesses, save the room service waiter, and they’ll get a hefty tip for their silence and complicity.

2 thoughts on “Sauce

  1. Ahhh, sauce. There’s this sauce, made at our local Middle Eastern restaurant. (Sahara in Charleston, WV, if you ever find yourself stuck here.) It’s a tomato sauce, and they bake eggplant in it with a little cheese on top and call it Moussaka. The Greeks shake their heads, cause it’s not really Moussaka, but oh my GOD I don’t care. I’m GLAD it’s not Moussaka. Because it’s SO MUCH FUCKING BETTER. It’s insane!

    It’s so rich, you’d swear they cooked an entire lamb in it, then picked out all the meat. Meat, wine, or something secret and smoky – because the taste is so rich that I don’t even want rice or any kind of carb to get in the way. It makes me roll my eyes back in my head EVERY SINGLE TIME. But I’ve stopped begging for the secret. I’m just grateful they let me eat it!

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