Susie Snyder’s West Texas Spaghetti Sauce by Susanne Rankin, Palace Kitchen
I grew up in Colorado. It was from that green outpost that my Texan father watched in horror as I changed from a little girl who ate meat at every meal into a teenager who decided to be a vegetarian. To eschew meat was to shun my very heritage, he explained, reminding me of his family’s multi-generational ties to cattle ranching. He lamented his decision to take me duck hunting when I was two, an experience I found traumatic, and declared that had he waited until I was a little older, I would not have turned out to be such a heretic.
But heretic I was and heretic I still am. I have consumed very little flesh in the past seventeen years. Fish I will eat on occasion and I am not one to fuss about stock. I have even been known to eat the rare contraband chicken. But I am a vegetarian at heart, despite these transgressions, and the meatless state is one to which I always return.
I went to quite a different state when I visited Texas for the holidays four or five years ago. Meat was everywhere. I always demurred when my relatives urged me to sample whatever variety of roast beast was gracing the table. But then one night my aunt greeted me at the door
way to her kitchen and said, “I made your grandma’s spaghetti for dinner tonight.”
Grandma’s spaghetti was a recipe concocted by my father’s mother, a no-nonsense sort of woman who died when I was fifteen. My own mother had often made it herself and as a child it was my favorite thing to have for dinner. But that child was far away from the Seattle vegetarian eyeing with alarm the ground beef and ketchup bubbling away in my aunt’s crock-pot. The idea of eating it filled me with disdain. I was in the land of the lost, that was for sure, and I foresaw my dinner as a plate of plain noodles over which I would sprinkle salt and maybe a pinch of the shredded Velveeta my aunt had laid on the table.
But as I took my plate in hand I started to think some more about Grandma’s spaghetti sauce. Not much besides oil and mesquite came out of the ground in West Texas. Grandma would have been hard-pressed to find any fresh basil on the remote ranch where she invented her recipe. Even sun-loving tomatoes would struggle to grow in the cracked Texas earth smelling of sulfur. Grandma used what she had to make her spaghetti sauce and what she had came in a bottle or went on all fours. Who was I to judge?
I dished myself up a plateful of noodles and added a scoop of Grandma’s spaghetti sauce. I could be a vegetarian again tomorrow. I took a bite. It wasn’t delicious, not delicious the way I had thought of it as a child. But it was good. Good enough to eat, anyway, and I smiled as I chewed on the unfamiliar chunks of ground beef.
Susie Snyder’s West Texas Spaghetti Sauce
1 pound of ground beef
3/4 bottle of ketchup*
1/2 bottle of Worcestershire sauce*
Salt, pepper, and garlic salt
1 white onion
Shredded Velveeta or cheddar cheese
Brown the meat in a heavy skillet. Season with a healthy pinch each of salt, pepper, and garlic salt. Add just enough water to cover the meat and simmer, covered, for twenty minutes. Serve over spaghetti. Garnish with chopped white onion and shredded cheese
*The bottles are the smaller, older glass kind.
(editor’s note: photo of empty spaghetti plate is from Spring Hill’s Monday Night Spaghetti Supper.)
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