Sauce #3 | Meatballs & Tomato Gravy, aka Sunday Sauce

Plus a relatively idiot-proof aioli

Hello, welcome to Sunday Sauce, a weekly recipe newsletter. This week’s newsletter contains a recipe for Sunday Sauce, an almost fool-proof aioli (never underestimate the ingenuity of a fool), and a brief homage to a restaurant in Brooklyn.

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There’s a restaurant in Brooklyn called Frankies Spuntino. Well, this one is called Frankies 457 (there are various Frankies Spuntini), and it is the correct one to go to on a Sunday before catching the red-eye back to Heathrow.

As far as my friend Sam is concerned it is the only thing you should be considering doing on a Sunday in New York if there is a plane to catch. Fill time in the morning, as we did five-odd years ago, mooching around a flea market, not buying anything, resenting your luggage, resenting the person who suggested mooching around a flea market (me in this instance), lightly perspiring, waiting for lunchtime.

If the sun is shining you want to ask for a table in the garden out the back and you probably want a cold beer, though the martinis are good and no doubt they do a fine caesar. Lay a foundation with some salumi and a crust of bread but pay attention to the fact that you’re likely going to want to order every pasta dish, and above all, the meatballs and gravy. Or, as it’s also known, Sunday sauce.

The meatballs are the size of a child’s fist, light, delicate, and bolstered by the southern Italian couplet of pine nut and raisin. The sauce (I can’t quite bring myself to call it ‘gravy’) is profound and flawless and you will probably think about it a lot in the days, weeks, and years that follow. Don’t hold back. Eat and drink well and not only will it be one of the great Sunday lunches, but it will set you up nicely for the flight back.

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If you find yourself wanting to recreate the dish at home, here’s how. Or rather, here’s one way to do it, albeit in a relatively simplified manner. There is no authentic recipe but one fairly key thread that runs through any, dare I say, correct version of Sunday sauce/gravy, is that it is cooked for a long time. Give me a quick tomato pasta any day of the week and I’m happy, but it is not Sunday sauce. Sunday sauce requires long, slow cooking. You may begin preparing it a day before. You may keep it ticking over for the entire weekend. You must, of course, go to Mass on Sunday morning, for the duration of which the gravy will, much like your odds of spending eternity in paradise, be greatly enhanced.

What goes into the sauce is something of a moveable feast. Pork flank, or braciole, is traditional (‘braciole’ since evolving into a more generalised term for bits of meat wrapped in other bits of meat, if that’s not an oversimplification), and is a good way of making the most of cheaper cuts and further amping up the sauce. Don’t overlook the character added by a few well chosen, well caramelised sausages to proceedings. And I can fulsomely recommend replicating the Frankies meatball recipe.

I didn’t do any of these things this Sunday. The local gamekeeper messaged to ask if I wanted a roe deer, to which I said yes please. I spent the morning breaking it down into its various parts, before mincing the trim and making meatballs. Venison is lean, as you know, meaning it’s worth ensuring the pork mince you buy is on the fattier side, should you be following suit on the venison front. By all means use beef instead.