Sauce for a Snowy Day

L ong ago, I made a pact with myself, swearing that there was no item important enough in my parents’ house worth fighting over with my siblings. This pact was brought to mind last weekend, when Sibling No. 3 laid claim to Mom’s giant metal roasting pan. I’ll let him have it, but only after a little sighing, because as my brother-in-law says, “Good things come out of that pan.”

This fabled roaster is an heirloom from my maternal grandmother and has been the source of countless delicious roasts, soups, stews, and sauces. My mom jokes that its secret is that it’s made of frowned-upon aluminum, but even if she’s right, we’ll still eat anything that comes out of there. In my opinion, the best meal to emerge from this storied pan is spaghetti and meatballs, of which it must now have seen thousands of iterations. Distant relations and dear friends alike ask for Mom’s recipe, and this past weekend, so did I.

Sadly, I have no such giant magic roaster (which is probably wise, since I generally only cook for one), so my dependable Dutch oven would have to suffice. Since we were in for the mother of all snowstorms starting late Saturday night, I intended to get all my grocery shopping done Friday evening in hopes of beating the crowds. Poor planning and faulty website information found me, at 1 p.m. on Saturday, wandering around my third grocery store in two days, chastising myself for not just ordering craft supplies from Amazon and grumbling at the store management who forgot to stock marrow bones.

Both the craft supplies and the marrow bones were necessary, the former because I had a class to prep for and the latter because I needed something to eat. Winter storms and snowfalls put me in the mood for spaghetti and meatballs, so that would be my meal of choice as I braced for Snowmageddon 2026.

Sunday morning was cold, crispy, and white, and since I (along with half the county) had gone to Mass the previous evening, there was nothing left to do but dive into my at-home activities. The sauce would come later — there were games to be played first.

Much of my immediately family is, alas, scattered to the four corners of the U.S., so we’ve come up with creative ways of staying connected. Currently, we have Sunday Zoom calls, the first hour of which usually involves me, my dad, and the Virginia contingent playing Wingspan. The next hour or so sees the college kids and the West Coast denizens hop on for a chat or a game of Qwixx. This particular Sunday, a few of us started the morning with Wingspan, and then signed off with promises to reconvene in a few hours when more people would be available.

With the festivities on pause, it was almost time to start the sauce. But first, I wanted to get some scones in the oven. My current obsession with British literature has led me to institute a teatime each day, and since I care more about the treats served at teatime than the tea itself, I’ve been experimenting with all manner of scones and cookies. I’ll write a full account of this venture another time, but for now, the current baked-good frontrunner is the orange and cranberry iteration of America’s Test Kitchen’s cream scone recipe. Once those were in the oven, I set my wax on to melt (I am experimenting with candle-making too — why not!) and turned my attention to The Sauce.

This is one of those passed-down-through-generations recipes, and while I grew up eating lots of this sauce, I’d never actually made it myself. It is, as some of the best recipes are, quite simple and doesn’t require more than basic pantry ingredients. To my chagrin, the recipe calls for celery, which I loathe, but since I was determined to follow everything (mostly) to the letter, I diced two ribs and an onion and got them going in some olive oil. Sadly, my sauce was destined from the beginning to be subpar, since I hadn’t been successful in my marrow bone hunt. This is an essential part of the sauce, since you use it as a base and build the rest of the flavors around it. I would have to make do with extra cheese and by finishing my meatballs in the sauce to impart some meaty flavor.

Much chopping, stirring, and can-opening later, I finally had all the components in the pot. Now, I’d just play the waiting game as all these ingredients melded together over the next four hours.

Make that six hours.

At 3 p.m., we all hopped back on Zoom for another round of games and long chats about home news and food. I proudly displayed my simmering sauce to all the video squares on my computer and was in the middle of making meatballs while listening to the conversation between my parents and Sibling No. 3, when said sibling asked if I’d added the wine. “Wine? But it wasn’t on the recipe card!” After being roundly castigated for forgetting the most important element of Italian cooking (though I still protested that it hadn’t been written on the card), I raided my pantry and stirred a generous amount of it into the pot.

A little while later, I waved goodbye to my family and got to work on the pasta. Orecchiette was all I had in the pantry, but it would do nicely, and I let that bubble away merrily while my meatballs were finishing off in the sauce. Ten minutes later, bowl of pasta and sauce in hand, I settled down for my long-awaited treat, topped (of course) with copious amounts of Romano cheese. Mom’s sauce, of course, is still better, but for now, this would do nicely.

Meatball sandwiches for lunch, anyone?