Cookbook authors, food journalists, travel guides, and celebrity chefs have created a powerful mystique around the quality of the ingredients they insist must go into great cooking. Very often they’ll point to the traditional cooking methods and materials of rural peoples in their favorite areas of Italy, France, Spain, Greece, etc. Now, I hate to be the little boy who points out that the Emperor has no clothes, but all the people that I’ve met who emigrated from those countries have consistently told me that for the most part, they were used to working with ingredients that were very often at the mercy of natural and economic catastrophes, poverty, or limited preservation methods.

When my parents emigrated to Canada in the early 1950’s there were precious few of the ingredients they were used to cooking with back home in Greece. For the most part they made do with what was available, and especially with what was cheap. My grandmother lived with us, and she cooked, kept house, and took care of me while my parents worked. And in between running around, playing with my friends, and watching TV…….I watched her cook. Boy, could she cook! She had a knack for extracting every ounce of flavor from her ingredients (often of a low quality that I wouldn’t even think of using today) and for combining these into some incredibly tasty dishes that made her famous within the circle of my parents’ friends. When Mrs. Litsa cooked, people lined up to get in!

The Ottoman occupation of Greece, the Great Depression, and two World Wars had honed her skills for producing great food with limited and often sub-standard materials. But, as I observed and came to understand over the years, it wasn’t so much about technique as it was about attitude and time. First and foremost, she absolutely wanted to please the people she loved. Secondly, she took great pride in her work. And third, she invested huge amounts of time to make the first two come true. For example, her meat sauce consisted of very few ingredients:

• An onion, very finely chopped by hand;
• A pound of cheap ground beef;
• A couple tablespoons of tomato paste diluted in some water;
• A little ground cinnamon and allspice;
• Some salt and pepper;
• Water to cover.

First she would saute the onion in some butter under low heat to soften it. Then she would raise the heat and brown the ground beef for a few minutes. She would add the water, diluted tomato paste and spices and begin the process of “digesting” the ingredients as she called it. The sauce would cook, uncovered, for 8-10 hours on the stove top at low heat. As the liquid evaporated she would add half a cupful of water at a time, repeating this ritual until she felt that the sauce was properly cooked. By dinnertime that sauce had basically blended together to a degree that no amount of high quality fancy-shmantzy ingredients could ever come close to.

She didn’t have a ceramic-cooktop stove. No microwave. No $300 Gastrolux pans. No freshly-ground 5%-fat organic eye-round. No Ravida estate-bottled Sicilian olive oil. No garden-fresh tomatoes hand-bottled in small batches at the end of each Summer by my wife. Just cheap beef and tomato paste! But man, I’ve never been able to replicate that taste despite my actually using all of the great equipment and ingredients above.

Love. Pride. Time…..there is no substitute.