Recipe - Binghamton,NY

My hubby is Italian and I make home made marinara. I don't cook it for 3 days though.

I don't have a "set" recipe... I just add things to our taste.

I use my automatic chopper and chop some onion, garlic and carrots.

Saute the veggies in a little butter until they are translucent.
Add 2 large cans of crushed tomatoes
Add a bit of sugar
Add Italian seasonings to taste
Personally, I chop about 4 anchovies and add to my mixture.
Simmer for an hour or so on very low.

I keep a jar of this in my fridge at all times.

My family loves it. When my daughter asks me someday for the recipe, she will just die to find out she's been eating anchovies all her life, LOL. She says she hates them.

This marinara does get better the longer it sits because the flavors meld together well.

I have an Italian friend who still makes his tomato sauce this way, and I think it's a bit absurd to spend that much time over one pot when the fresh is just as tasty if not tastier....

But here goes....you must have a good stove with that perfect very low setting, or you'll have to use a large crockpot.

Saute your veggies: 2 onions, bell pepper, garlic, mushroom if you like, grated carrot.

Add to it 2 large cans of crushed tomatoes, or whole tomatoes but they will require a hand held food blender, 2 cans tomato paste rinsed with half water half wine. Add bay leaf and 1 T Italian seasonings.

Bring it all to a boil, reduce to lowest setting and cook for as long as you want. The flavors get better after 24 hours.

Prior to refrigeration, cooking these sauces this way was the only way to keep them sterile. Otherwise, you can cook for a couple of hours, transfer to the frig, or put the crockpot outside in the winter and re-heat the next day when the flavors have melded.

HTH!!

I know all my grandma's sauces and we never wrote them down either. Part was that you can't write them down, it is a process. Unfortunately I am Sicilian and that sounds Italian perhaps northern. We cook differently, ya know?

You may want to try googling sauces and see what sounds right.

The problem you are going to run into is even if you find the right recipe it won't taste the same, no one writes the process down, you learn it.

Could she have cooked it for so long because rabbit was in it? I honestly can't figure out why it would have to cook for that long.

Almost all tomato sauces have sugar and tomato paste in them.

My mom used to cook the sauce all day long. Best sauce ever. She never added water though. She used to use cans of Hunt's tomato sauce and tomato paste. The paste is what thickens the sauce. I don't know if your talking about meat sauce or regular sauce. If meat sauce she would brown the meat with the onions first, then add the tomato paste and sauce. She'd only drain the meat, if there was too much fat in it. For the regular sauce, she'd cook it until it boiled, then brown the meat balls and add them and 1 or 2 pork chops...She'd continue cooking it the entire day, occationally stirring it. (The pork chops were a "secret" family ingredient she learned from my Italian Aunt.) I remember her fishing out the bones and the chops so our company never knew pork was in there. The dog used to get the pork until I got older and started asking for it. (Dad would eat the pork if it was just family.) She used garlic powder instead of fresh, because she wanted the flavor to go through the sauce. She also used itlain seasoning. She used to say it was "cheating," but quicker than trying to figure out how much of each spice to use. Don't forget the oregano and a little basil. Oh...and the bay leaf. Yeah, she was always fishing the bay leaves out too when it was done. (The meat/meat balls were always browned in a little olive oil....If you drain the meat, save a little of the drippings for the sauce.) Oh...by-the-way...a lot of families just cook without recipes...Us Germans do that too. Just a handful of this and a pinch of that....Probably why I never liked cooking in Home Ec. class.