My father was a traveling salesman for much of my life growing up and it was always exciting to hear about his trips to NYC. He loved an Italian restaurant in the City and convinced the chef to share a spaghetti sauce recipe with him that he then adapted to his — and our family's — tastes. It soon became our special-occasion dinner; he prepared it for company, often for the boyfriends of his three daughters. Somewhere along the line it was called "Daddy's Famous Spaghetti" by one of those boyfriends and it stuck.
I also served it myself in my own apartment in Chapel Hill to a boy in my graduate school program the evening of our first date. I am still serving it to him — maybe even this weekend — as we were married about two years and much more spaghetti later.
Note the term "spaghetti" — even adventurous cooks like my Dad were not using the term pasta in the ’60s. In fact our favorite spaghetti was good old Mueller's, and we loved the really long, thin spaghetti that came in the plastic wrapper rather than a box. And of course we all learned to twirl it!
Cook together 4 garlic cloves, sliced thinly, in 1/2 cup olive oil until very lightly brown. Remove from the oil. Add three medium onions, chopped, and cook until lightly colored. Add 2 1/2–3 lbs. ground beef to pot and brown well; season with salt and pepper.
(I would suggest one deviation from this method: brown the beef in small batches by itself, drain and then add to the oil and onions. Daddy always carefully ladled out the fat after browning the meat, but he lost the olive oil that way, and it was much harder to remove the fat.)
Add:
- 2 large cans of good quality Italian tomatoes
- 2 15-ounce cans tomato sauce (homemade if you have it)
- 1 tablespoon chili powder
- 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tablespoon parsley flakes or 3/4 cup chopped fresh Italian parsley
- 1 tablespoon dried basil
- 1 teaspoon dried oregano
- 4 bay leaves
- 1/2 green bell pepper, chopped
- 4–6 stalks celery, sliced thin, including leaves
- 4–6 carrots, sliced thin
Cook over a slow fire for 2–3 hours. Just before serving add 1 pound fresh sliced mushrooms, sautéed till brown in oil and butter; taste the sauce for seasoning, adding additional salt and pepper if necessary.
This recipe originally called for no fresh ingredients — you could not buy fresh herbs or fresh mushrooms at the grocery store even in Atlanta where we lived when Daddy developed the recipe. But now I encourage you to use fresh herbs instead — just add them near the end of cooking and use 3–4 times as much of the fresh herb as the dried.
Makes about 3 quarts.
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