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My wife's saucy past
Published: 12/3/2011 8:26 PM
Last Modified: 12/3/2011 8:26 PM

My wife and I spent a good part of Saturday seeing red.

Not because of the OU-OSU game, although as I write this, OU isn't doing at all well. (Sigh.)

Rather, we were creating a whole lot of pizza sauce.

It’s a recipe – a process, really – that has as much to do with memories as with making something to eat.

The actual recipe dates back to the 1960s and has its origins in, of all places, Kansas. That is where a neighbor’s brother was running a Pizza Inn franchise, which at this time made its sauce in-house.

Karen still has that original recipe, typewritten on a yellowed index card, although over the years she and her mother tinkered with the original recipe, tweaking the herbs and spices to give the sort of heat and tang they liked.

The current recipe uses a couple of gallons of tomatoes, a couple of gallons of tomato puree, a bunch of celery and onions, nearly a pound of garlic, cooked for hours in the oven until it’s been reduced by about a quarter. It needs to be stirred about every 20 minutes. And it’s worth it all the work.

During the years that Karen lived at home, her mother would once a year turn out a couple dozen pints of sauce that would last the family through a year of Sunday night pizza dinners. She continued making sauce once a year until the late 1990s.

In 1999, one of Karen’s Christmas gifts from her mother was a gigantic, industrial-sized roasting pan, so large that it just barely fits into our oven, specifically so Karen could take over all the pizza sauce-making duties in the family. Her mother died less than three months later, never getting the chance to try for herself Karen’s sauce.

So making this sauce is, for my wife, a way of remembering, of reconnecting with, her mother. That it produces a pizza sauce that I think is second to none is just a happy coincidence.







Reader Comments 1 Total
If this sauce is at least half as good as Karen's holiday cookies, I bet this is absolutely fantastic!
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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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