Sex and Bacon (12 page)

But I’m less interested in some kind of pure ideal of spaghetti sauce—an Ultimate Spaghetti Sauce recipe culled from thousands of recipes passed down for generations and countless handwritten notations in the margins of store-bought cookbooks. No, I’m more interested in what
you
put in
your
sauce. Because I don’t think any kind of objectivity is possible. I think spaghetti sauce is something unique, like fingerprints. I think my sauce is mine and yours is yours, and, furthermore, I have a Fancy Spaghetti Sauce that I make for guests I’d like to seduce and a Modest Spaghetti Sauce that I make for myself at the end of the month, when I’m broke and hungry. You may have a couple of different sauces, too. I’d like to eat them—especially at the end of the month—instead of my own Modest Sauce, a sad mélange of canned tomato sauce, oregano, and old, soft onions. (Maybe I should try adding a spoonful of sugar.)

THE KEY TO
my Fancy Spaghetti Sauce is sausage, honestly. Lots of sausage. And lots of
different
sausage, if you want to be decadent. Lamb, veal, pork, beef—even chicken or turkey. If it’s ground and spiced, throw it in! The more animals simmering in harmony on your range the better! In a stew of garlicky tomato sauce, creatures locked in perpetual combat in Nature can relax and enjoy each other’s company, putting their differences aside in pursuit of a common goal: deliciousness.

If you’re a vegetarian, I’m sorry, but you’re missing out. Sausage—real meat sausage, not the vegan kind made from sawdust, cornmeal, and animal-byproduct-free glue—is almost indescribably savory. You can dine alone on inexpensive supermarket sausage braised in a single skillet with sauerkraut and new potatoes, or you can dress up boutique meat-counter sausage with fresh herbs and breadcrumbs on a bed of field greens for guests, because sausage is as confident and charming as a bunch of offal stuffed into intestinal casing can be. Sausage says,
I’m
glad you came
, and
Don’t you took beautiful tonight
. Sausage is both regal and wonderfully proletarian. Sausage is down-to-earth, unpretentious—comfortable grilled and served with only a dab of stone-ground mustard or dressed in a velvety blanket of gravy over peppered grits and eggs. Sausage is a special friend to poor people in particular—our patron saint of chopped fat and spice and connective tissue and scrap meat—because it lends a large amount of flavor to cheap and filling foods like rice and noodles and potatoes. Sausage is
good
. Sausage
doed
good. I love sausage!

You could make this recipe without sausage, if you wanted to make some kind of point about Not Needing Meat, Thank You Very Much—I Get Enough Protein From Combining Starches, And Besides, The Planet Can’t Afford It. But remember: Sausage will always take you back. Sausage has a lot of love to give. You just have to whisper
Yed
to it and sausage will sweep you away to gustatory paradise, I promise, no matter how many starches you combined for your joyless little lunch or how earnestly you tell yourself that meat-free soy patties are “better than the real thing.” Ha! Sure—like a punch in the face from a surly political vegan is better than getting tongue-kissed by your own sweet lover!

ANYHOW—TO MAKE
my Fancy Sauce, start by chopping onions.

Actually, wait. This is my Fancy Sauce, so start by pouring yourself a glass of red wine. Any red will do. You’re gonna cook with half of it, so don’t spend too much, because it really doesn’t matter. You know Gato Negro—the red wine that used to be packaged with
an actual tiny black plastic cat
dangling from a string around the neck of each bottle?

I bought a bottle of Gato Negro about six months ago for old times’ sake, and I’m not gonna lie to you: To my thirty-six-year-old palate, it really sucked. I found it excruciatingly tannic, as if every sip actually robbed moisture from my mouth instead of adding to it, like cotton batting stuffed into a wound—and the worst part was,
there was no plastic cat!
There was just
a picture
of a black cat on the label!

But my point is simply this: Even Gato Negro will do. It’ll do to drink—and at about $5 a bottle (last time I checked), it won’t break your bank. It cooks up wonderfully well, and despite its undeniably astringent mouth-feel, it’ll get you loosey goosey enough to prepare my Fancy Sauce with a little verve and, dare I say it,
panache
. Because, and I didn’t mention this earlier, but boy is Fancy Sauce fun to make! And it’s so damn good! And it will get you laid! I’m telling you, you’ll want to have -wine. Which will mean getting at least one decent bottle. Maybe two if you’re showing off by cooking in front of your guest—a move I highly recommend. Everyone likes to feel pampered, and what’s more pampering than cooking a meal for someone? You’ll also appear competent, grownup, and together—like you’re enough of an adult to keep actual ingredients myour kitchen instead of just plastic jugs of bottom-shelf liquor, half-empty jars of rancid cocktail garnishes, and boxes of Girl Scout cookies and Honey Smacks. When I’m looking to get laid, I at least like to pretend an interest in my own nutritional welfare.

Okay, so pour that glass of red wine. Take a sip. If you’re entertaining, make sure your guest’s glass is full (and
stays
full).

Now, get out your cutting board—wooden or plastic, it doesn’t matter. Chop up one whole onion. While you’re at it, chop up a green pepper or two. Don’t worry about cutting perfect little cubes. If you’re OCD by nature, you really need to harness your urge toward chop overkill, because, honestly, bigger pieces of onion and pepper will cook do’wn and get soft and will ultimately make your Sauce more visually interesting. You don’t want the Fancy Sauce to look like it came from a jar. The whole point is,
d doesn’t
. So leave chunks.

Okay. Now it’s time to get out your sausage. If you bought loose sausage meat (the kind that looks like ground beef, often sold as “Italian sausage” or “sweet sausage”), just take it out of the fridge and unwrap it. If you bought link sausage (“breakfast” sausage, andouille, hot links, kielbasa—basically anything that’s hot dog—or cigar-shaped and in a casing), slice each link into pieces diagonally so you get little extended disc shapes. Or cut your sausage up however you like. (
I
like the extended disc shapes, but then again, I drink $5 red wine, so maybe you have your own idea of what you want and that’s totally okay . . . you big snob!)

Now get out a big skillet. Cast iron is best. But whatever. Make it a big one. You want your ingredients to have plenty of room to move.

Put the skillet on your range, turn the heat up to medium-ish, and let it get hot. (A good test for skillet heat: Take a finger-ful of water and flick it at the pan. If the water hisses and hops around, congratulations! Your skillet is officially hot enough for the next part of this recipe! But if the water droplets you flick just sit there, turn the heat up a bit or wait a little longer, because your pan isn’t ready yet.)

Once your pan is hot, throw in some olive oil—just a sprinkle or two, fast fast. You’re not trying to cover the whole bottom of the skillet with oil, but you do want to have enough so that your ingredients won’t stick until the fat in the sausage melts and takes over. If you don’t have olive oil, you can use any fat you’ve got around the house—lard, Crisco, canola, anything. Don’t use butter, though. If you want extrasuper bonus Fancy Sauce points, use bacon grease that you’ve saved in a crock in your fridge since the last time you fried up a pan of bacon.

(I am taking a conscious aside here. Bacon is truly the Wonder Food. Nearly every assemblage of ingredients it touches becomes infinitely better—more flavorful, more savory, more complex, more
layered
in taste and deliciousness. When you fry bacon, pour off the grease and save it. Bacon grease is liquid gold! When you cook with bacon grease, people will love whatever you make for them and will clamor for more, and they’ll never know it’s because you’re using culinary voodoo. It’s almost unfair. But again, if you’re looking to get laid, you gotta pull out the big guns. Sugar in the sauce is nothing—when I haven’t gotten any play in months, I seriously consider adding Rohypnol.)

Dump the onions, green peppers, and sausage into the hot skillet with the oil (or bacon grease) and use a wooden spoon to keep everything moving around so the food doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. If your sausage is loose, use the wooden spoon to separate the lump of sausage into individual-size chunks. Just kind of stir everything together, allowing the sausage to brown and the veggies to get nice and soft and coated with olive oil and the meat-grease that will ooze out of the sausage. Turn the heat down a little bit if it seems like anything’s getting too brown too fast, or if the pan starts smoking. Keep stirring. If you’re using link sausages cut up into discs, be sure to flip the discs over with your spoon so both sides of each sausage-coin get browned.

Now everything’s gonna go fast, so pay attention. You may want to take this opportunity to pour yourself more wine. Top off your guest’s glass while you’re at it, you Continental seducer.

Get out a big stockpot. It should have a lid, but if you don’t have one, you can always cover it with tinfoil. Once the sausage is mostly brown, scrape the onion/green pepper/sausage mixture into the stockpot. And listen, the sausage should only be
mostly
brown—some pink is actually good, because it’s gonna cook all the way in the sauce and you definitely don’t want the meat to be cooked into dry, hard little mouse turds. Don’t overcontrol the Sauce! Trust the Sauce! It knows what it’s doing—it just wants you to be relaxed with it and to add everything in, but then it really just wants to be left alone as it transforms from an assemblage of ingredients into vibrant, cohesive Sauce. Be a Jedi Master about this. If you’re finding yourself uptight, simply have more wine.

Speaking of wine, pour a little into the skillet, and use the wooden spoon to scrape up as many of the browned and crusty bits sticking to the bottom of the pan as you can. (This is called
deglazing
, if you want to be all fancy about it.) Dump the wine/ crusty bits mixture into the stockpot over the onions, green peppers, and sausage.

Now: Throw in a few cans of tomato sauce. If you have any cans of diced or crushed tomatoes, throw those in too. You can throw in one of those minicans of tomato paste if you like, but don’t add more than one can of paste or your sauce will get too thick. Stir everything around with your wooden spoon. Fancy Sauce freezes beautifully and keeps for months, so you may want to make a whole bunch of it, if you can. It pretty much just depends on how many cans of tomato products you have in your kitchen, and on the capacity of your stockpot.

The fun part of Fancy Sauce starts now. Gather up any or all of the following things: oregano, rosemary, thyme, parsley, fennel, garlic powder, minced garlic (I use the fresh minced garlic in water or oil sold in jars near the bins of dry garlic bulbs in nearly any medium-to-large supermarket—I go through vast quantities of this, and yeah, I know it’s not as good as mincing your own garlic but I just throw in a few extra spoonfuls and call it good), Lawry’s Seasoned Salt (if you like it—otherwise regular salt), black pepper, cayenne pepper, white pepper, poultry seasoning, Italian seasoning, dill (not too much of this), and basil.

All the herbs and spices I refer to above should be
dried
, not fresh, but if you have a bunch of fresh herbs lying around, throw ’em in—why not? Throw all the herbs/spices/seasonings you’ve picked out from the list above into your stockpot, which should be on your range on the lowest heat setting. Use
lotd
of oregano, garlic, and pepper—like big bountiful handfuls! Use small amounts of fennel and dill—like modest palmfuls. Everything else, just go medium. But if you’re using garlic salt instead of garlic
powder
, be cautious with the amount you use because it’s mostly just salt, and you don’t want your Fancy Sauce to taste like the Dead Sea. Dump in a few glasses ofwine for good measure.

Let your Sauce simmer on the range uncovered, on the lowest possible heat setting, for three or four hours. Stir it every now and again. After a while taste it—it may need more spices or more salt. Correct the seasoning. Once it’s cooked down to a nice thick saucy consistency, cover the pot with the lid (or tinfoil) to keep any more liquid from evaporating. Mostly,
Leave it alone
—a good sauce doesn’t need much prodding. (Alternatively, put your Sauce into a Crockpot on the lowest possible setting, cover it, and forget about it overnight—no stirring needed.)

Once your Sauce has cooked down to the right consistency and you’ve covered the pot to keep it from reducing any further, you can serve it anytime. Leaving it on the burner just develops the flavor, which is nice if it’s cold out and you want to keep your kitchen warm and fragrant, or if you’re waiting for guests to arrive. Sometimes at this point I’ll throw in a fe’w packages of frozen chopped spinach and possibly a can of drained marinated artichoke hearts, but this is totally up to you—I just like a lot of
stuff
in my sauce, and sneaking in veggies is also a great way to add nutrients. (Be sure to allow the sauce to heat the frozen stuff through before you serve it.) If you aren’t planning on eating your thickened sauce immediately, remove it from the range and refrigerate it.

Serve your Sauce over pasta with crusty French bread torn into chunks by hand. (Cutting French bread just squashes it and looks overcontrolling, whereas tearing it up gives you a devilish air of spontaneity. Don’t be the culinary equivalent of the person at the party who can’t stop chopping up blow.) Serve with candles on the table and another bottle of wine.

Your kisses will taste like garlic, but if your guest isn’t a vampire, it won’t matter. Besides, if you’ve been following my directions carefully, you’re both probably pretty toasted. Skip dessert and go directly to bed. Congratulations, you hot-booty gourmand! You’re getting laid!