"YES PEOPLE JUST LOVE SUNDAY SAUCE"
It was the # 1 Bestseller ITALIAN COOKBOOKS on Amazon.com Kindle for more than 2 Years, outselling: Lida Bastianich, Giada DeLaurentis, Debi Mazur, and other Bestselling Italian Cookbook Authors. Sunday Sauce the defining cookbook on the Italian-American Communities favorite and most supreme dish, Sunday Sauce, which some people call Gravy. If you are not familiar with Sunday Sauce and what it is, it's a dish of various meats slowly braised in a tomato based sauce (Gravy). The meats may vary, but usually contain 2 or more of these favorite items: Sausage, Meatballs, Braciole, Pork Neck, Pig Skin Braciole, and or Pork Spare Ribs. The most popular way to make Sunday Sauce Gravy is with; Sausage, Meatballs, and Braciole. When the Gravy (Sunday Sauce) is ready it is served with short- maccheroni pasta, either before eating the meats, you dress the Maccheroni with a little bit of the Sauce., and eat it first, having the Braised Meats as a second course. Most others prefer having the pasta along with the meats. Either way is great. Though many have argued to whether you should call it Gravy or Sauce, it really doesn't matter, as long as it taste good. So Mangia Bene sempre.
If you're a person like me, that tends to collect cookbooks because some of the recipes inside look good and then you don't get around to using the cookbook as much as you'd like, then you might find that this is a cookbook that you pull from the shelves for use more than the others. It's a nice size for using in the kitchen. And the recipes all look delicious and they're not extremely complicated to make or extravagant. Last night I made the Secret Sauce (Salsa Segreto). And I have to say it turned out really good. The sauce reminded me of the sauce from a little pasta shop from around my home town called the Spaghetti Shop. Their sauce is so amazingly good that people from all around go their for pasta. And for years I've wondered what they put in it. This sauce isn't exactly like it as far as looks, but the taste is identical. I'm not sure if it was the San Marzano canned tomatoes I used or maybe the little big of crushed red pepper, but it was on the money. San Marzano tomatoes are supposed to have a stronger and sweeter taste with less acidity. I couldn't taste the difference straight out of the can, but once cooked the taste was stronger. Not sure if it was the type of tomatoes or the combination of ingredients, but it had a strong flavor once finished cooking that wasn't your ordinary tomato sauce.
If I have any complaint about the cookbook, it is that a little more time should have been taken to carefully write the recipes and directions out. The recipe mentions 5 tablespoons and then a cup for the olive oil. Which is it? I surely don't think he meant a full cup of olive oil. Crushed red pepper is called out, but it doesn't state when to add it in any of the steps that I saw. And steps 4 and 6 looked like a mix-up where step 4 was basically the same as step 6 which was the last step. But one mentioned adding the cheese and the other did not. So you have to do a little creative interpretation. The crush red pepper I figured went into the sauce near the beginning. I think the butter was supposed to get added on top of the pasta and allowed to melt. I think it might have been a little tough to get it to melt on top of the pasta, so I added it one tablespoon at a time in the last 5 minutes of cooking to the sauce. Then I added my parmesan. The sauce is quite good without the parmesan. But the addition of the parmesan really changes the flavor and thickness of the sauce once added.
Overall, this looks like a really good cookbook. A little interpretation is needed for the recipes. And it misses the index at the back that all of us tend to thumb to right away to find what recipe we want to cook. Just remember, the list of recipes are at the front. I don't think an index really makes sense for this cookbook, but it would have been nice to have had the list of recipes at the back of the book too since that is where all of us cooks go first to look up where the recipe is that we plan to cook.
The interesting stories, simplicity of the recipes, and quality of the food I think will have others like myself pulling this cookbook off the shelf quite regularly instead of letting it sit on the shelf and collect a little more dust than we'd like our cookbooks to collect. If you try it out, I think you'll like it as I have.
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