Red Sauce for the Soul

Comfort food when I need comfort

Early last week, on a cool and rainy day, I came back from working at the food pantry, hung my coat and hat on the rack, set my Spotify to Radiohead, and started gathering the ingredients for red sauce.

It all happened without thought, or, more accurately, it happened beneath the level of conscious thought because my conscious mind was spinning. Without going into detail, suffice to say my personal life got upended like a trash bin in a windstorm, and it’ll take me time to process it all.

Chances are good that many of you are like me, in that when you feel this way you simply don’t eat; the rest of you are probably stress eaters. So after several days of subsisting on pretzels and coffee, my body grabbed my mind by the throat and hissed: feed me, you fool!

And there is only one thing I could possibly make in such a situation: My red sauce.

I’ve been making it since I was a small boy. It’s my rendition of my mom’s spaghetti sauce, one of a dozen-or-so dishes she made that remain strong in my memory decades later. There isn’t anything special about it: onions, garlic, “chop meat” — the New Jersey idiom for ground meat — or Italian sausage, oregano, thyme, red wine, tomato paste and crushed tomatoes. Sometimes a hint of cinnamon and clove, sometimes red pepper flakes.

I have made this sauce for big events, intimate dinners, Sunday suppers, to impress a woman, to salve grief. More than once it has been seasoned by my tears.

Not this time, however. This time the feeling is more of a numbness, a settling in of a new reality that I knew was likely but had not fully emotionally prepared for.

It feels a lot like the one and only time in my life I got fired. I was the Sacramento Bureau Chef of the Stockton Record in 2008, covering politics and elections. I was probably the highest paid reporter at the paper, and that era was the beginning of the end for newspapers. I knew my time there would be short. But surely they wouldn’t be dumb enough to fire the political reporter in an election year? If you’re gonna shoot the mule, don’t you think you oughta do it at the top of the hill, not the bottom?

Needless to say, I got laid off, and they closed the bureau, a week before the primary elections. The fact that I knew 2008 was likely my last year in that job softened the blow enough where I wasn’t as crushed as you might think.

I made red sauce that night, and my partner at the time, Holly, said things would likely turn out OK in the end.

I got a new job three weeks later.

I made a lot of red sauce in 2023, the year after Holly and I split, both as a way to lift myself up when I was down, and as a thank you to those who showed me kindnesses during that difficult year. I remember one memorable night where I made it for someone who’d never once had anyone cook for her in her own home.

So, last week, after puttering with work for a few hours, and before I had to go on the first podcast of my Borderlands book tour, I made red sauce.

Olive oil gets hot in a pot, but not too hot. Just enough so I can smell it. Then I toss in quite a lot of minced onions. Yellow normally, but any kind will do. Sometimes I’ll cook these until well browned, even caramelized. This adds a layer of flavor most red sauces don’t possess.

Garlic, lots of it, goes in next, along with any ground meat I’m using. That night it was uncased spicy Italian sausage from a wild hog. The meat needs a good browning, so this process typically lasts about as long as it takes me to drink a glass of wine. It was a 2000 Barolo that night. Big Thoughts require Big Wine.

I laze over the pot, sipping, and stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon that has a flat edge so I can catch every bit of fond on the bottom of the pot.

I often let that fond stick and brown — never blacken — and then splash red wine in to loosen it with the spoon. If I am especially sad, or especially interested in impressing someone, I’ll let this happen three times. It’s a small trick that makes my sauce better than most. And lets me drink more wine.

Next comes the tomato paste. I use a whole can. After all, they’re so small. Mix it in and let it cook, turning the color of old bricks. More wine in the tomato paste can, then I use my finger to loosen every iota of tomato paste out of it. I am a thrifty Scotsman, after all. Into the pot it goes.

I open a can of crushed tomatoes. Maybe two. Mixing them into the rest, I think, “Now we’re getting somewhere.” I toss in a healthy pinch of salt.

Time for the herbs, and either the warm spices or the pepper flakes. This night would be pepper flakes. If I have it, I’ll add some venison or duck or pheasant stock to the pot. If not, a little water is fine. You want your red sauce to be soupy at first, loose and a bit unfocused. It should not look like a proper sauce yet. That only comes with time.

If this is a party, I’ll add pork shoulder — usually country ribs — and, later, homemade meatballs and maybe some cased sausage, which I like to cook in the sauce, then fish out and slice into thick coins. I like that meaty red sauce a lot, but this night was more requiem than party. So just the uncased sausage.

Another glass of Barolo while it simmers. “Bad Luck City” by R.L. Burnside came on the radio. Perfect. 🙄I hit “next song.” Role Model’s “Superglue” came on. Wrong vibe. I hit the button again: This time it was Devon Cole’s “W.I.T.C.H.” That’ll do.

As the red sauce burbled away, I thought of how life is often not linear, about false starts, how relationships wax and wane, shifting in ways we can and cannot control. How things end, and how endings aren’t always what they seem. And about beginnings that arise from the embers of those endings.

A scarlet flash out the back window caught my eye. It was Mr. Cardinal. He and his wife live in my yard. She perched on my garage’s roof, keeping an eye out for him while he focused on pecking for seeds and bugs on the ground. Then they switched. Never too close, their bond was loose but strong. I love that.

It was time. I boiled some salty water and tossed in some bucatini, which seemed like a good choice for the day.

The sauce was good. It always is. It’s always there for me. Always.