By Catherine Levasseur
Oct.13, 2018
I always thought that spaghetti, basically spaghetti sauce on any kind of pasta, was an Italian dish that trickled down to the French Canadian, Quebecois, culture due to immigration in the 19th century.
Poorer families in Quebec used pasta as a bed for anything. They threw in a large pot the fresh produces and meat they had at the time, added some seasoning, most likely salt and pepper, and let it simmer on the stove.
According to cultural legends, Marco Polo introduced pasta to my people in Quebec after his trip to Asia. But in fact, pasta does not originate from Italy, but rather from China.
Do not tell my mom about this, she takes a lot of pride in this dish.
“It’s us Quebecois that invented spaghetti,” my mother said. “My spaghetti sauce is better than most meat sauce at Italian restaurants.”
In Quebec, most families have their own, original, spaghetti sauce that is passed down from generation to generation. Some use pork, others use beef. Then, spices combination and the flavor profile also change from one family to the next.
At my house, spaghetti fits any occasion from an improvised dinner before soccer practice to a family reunion, and my mom’s spaghetti is the family favorite.
Year after year, my aunts and uncle have requested my mother’s dish, assuming she got the recipe from her mother tweaked it to make it her own. For them, eating the spaghetti sauce was a way to relive their mother’s cooking legacy after she passed away.
My mother never thought much about the recipe’s origins. But, I remember vividly the evening my mom’s secret came out. It was a couple weeks before Christmas. We hosted a family dinner at our house and played outside in the snow all day. It was freezing outside, and snowflakes fell from the sky like feathers. Mom’s spaghetti sauce simmered on the stove all day.
When we walked in the house, my mother and her sisters were talking about the ingredients, when my mom’s secret was revealed. It was not grandma’s recipe, but a recipe taken out of a food magazine.
“The chef gave his recipe,” my mother said. “It won the best spaghetti sauce of the year, I assumed it tasted good.”
Every year after the first snow we invite the family over; we play outside all day and have dinner. On the menu: Spaghetti. My mother still believes it does not matter who created the recipe or where the recipe comes from.
“Traditions are made around food, but there would be no tradition without the people we love,” she said.
But it was not the case. Mom stumbled on this recipe in a food magazine and claimed it as her own.
Catherine Levasseur 