Twice-Cooked Pork: From Joyce Chen’s 1961 Kitchen to Today’s Sichuan Pantry

As I’ve mentioned before, I have a large collection of modern, vintage, and antique cookbooks. One of the things I enjoy most is comparing how recipes have evolved over the decades and seeing how cooks adapted authentic dishes to the ingredients available at the time.

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Sicilian Marinara Sauce-Workhorse of Nonna’s Kitchen

I got this marinara recipe from a friend’s grandmother. She had emigrated from Sicily in the early 1920’s and settled in the North End of Boston. She wrote the recipe down in a piece of scrap paper with a stubby little pencil. I had that piece of paper for years and then it disappeared. I admit I was pretty upset. I was planning on framing it. 

She always had a batch of this sauce going on her stove, and always served it with rigatoni or mezze rigatoni. 

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