I don’t know about you guys, but the second I detect the faintest hint of fall in the air, I get a sudden, irrepressible hankering to make comfort foods — the kind that need to simmer low and slow for several hours, that you can spend a lazy Sunday afternoon tending to while you do all the other crap you have to deal with on Sunday afternoons. One of the most comforting meal memories I have from childhood is my mother’s spaghetti sauce. It had some perfunctory vegetable content (celery, maybe some carrot), but the meat-to-everything else ratio was off the charts — so much so that its consistency was almost chili-like. You could probably stand a spoon up in that business. It would be slopped lovingly over all manner of pasta (straight up spaghetti, layered into lasagna, baked with rotini), but my favourite way to eat it was with elbow macaroni. I suspect that this was my first experience with the sauce only because, let’s face it, elbow macaroni is decidedly more kid-friendly. Yet I still eat it this way, mostly because the tubular shape of the pasta is a perfect vehicle for delivering all that hearty sauce.
I will still take a Sunday afternoon to make this sauce (or, better yet, wait for my mother to make a giant batch, which she will distribute to me and my brother in frozen Ziploc-bagged portions). I’ve used my mother’s recipe, tweaked it to make it more my own, and even ventured into “let’s make the most authentic Bolognese sauce possible” territory (which requires four hours of simmering, plus wading through quite a lot of food-nerd message boards). But sometimes, you just want that long-simmered taste without it taking up half your day — and friends, I have discovered a recipe that somehow achieves this in just over 30 minutes.
Taken initially from Jill Dupleix’s Totally Simple Food (whose praises I’ve already sung here), this recipe takes a shortcut by using Italian sausage as a base meat, which aids in boosting the flavour of the sauce from the get-go. However, it retains one of the key methods in making an authentic Bolognese by simmering the meat in milk before adding the tomatoes, which adds a layer of sweetness to the sauce and reportedly mellows the acidity of the tomatoes (there are all kinds of theories as to what this actually achieves, and this is the one I’m sticking with). With the addition of some mushrooms and a bit of fennel seed, you can have a rich, complex meat sauce in far less time than the typical ragu recipe requires. And finally, you can still use a tubular pasta to grab up all the hearty bits sitting at the bottom of your bowl. Macaroni would still work, but here we graduate to cavatappi (which is also sometimes called “Scoobi-Doo” — so much for finding a more mature pasta).
Quick, Inauthentic Bolognese Sauce
Adapted from Jill Dupleix’s Totally Simple Food
3 large Italian sausages
2 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, diced
large pinch fennel seed
large pinch crushed red chilies
½ cup milk
2 cups chopped cremini or shiitake mushrooms
1 396 ml can whole tomatoes, with juices
½ tsp sugar
pinch of ground nutmeg
salt and pepper
1 lb cavatappi or other tubular, short pasta
grated Parmesan cheese
1. Heat olive oil on medium heat in a large frying pan. Cook onion, fennel seed and chili flakes gently until softened, about 5 minutes.
2. Slice sausages open lengthwise and peel off casing. Pinch the meat into the pan, breaking up with the back of a spoon and cooking gently. Add milk and simmer until it is all absorbed.
3. Add mushrooms and cook gently for a few minutes until they begin to sweat. Roughly chop the tomatoes (I like to just cut them up with kitchen shears while they’re still in the can), and add to the pan with juices. Stir in sugar and nutmeg. Bring to a boil, then simmer for about 15 minutes, stirring occassionally. Season to taste with salt and fresh ground pepper.
4. While sauce is cooking, prepare pasta until al dente. Toss together with sauce and parmesan cheese, garnishing with more cheese on top.
Sara Chan is a Toronto-based entertainment lawyer, food enthusiast, unprofessional home chef and even less professional food photographer. Her favourite food group is pork.