When I was young, way back in the last century, I had a recipe for Sloppy Joes in my first cookbook, a smallish volume for kids published by someone like Betty Crocker -- my memory grows dim on the details. It had a simple, no-fuss recipe for Sloppy Joes, and I prepared it with some frequency. It made Sloppy Joes that tasted the way Sloppy Joes were supposed to taste.
Then years passed and I cooked no Sloppy Joes. Then, sometime in the last year, I had a hankering and I started looking around for recipes. My goodness, but finding something that would make Sloppy Joes the way they were supposed to taste was well night impossible, so gussied up the recipes had become, no doubt in a misguided effort to "update" the recipe for "modern" tastes. Puh-lease.
The closest thing I could find to a real Sloppy Joe taste came from 500 Treasured Country Recipes, a pleasant and useful cookbook by Martha Storey. I had to make a few alterations, some of which look suspiciously like updating for modern tastes, but please believe me that this was what it took to create something that tasted the way it should for where my taste is today. It's yummy. By the way, the plain yellow mustard is a critical ingredient for my taste, and I would not substitute some fancy Dijon mustard or English-pub mustard in this case.
Recipes will usually insist that one drain the ground beef after browning; I usually don't unless it's unusually fatty, because it enhances the taste and the mouth feel, and it gives the bread something good to soak up. I serve the Sloppy Joes open-face over potato rolls. It makes enough for four pretty hearty appetites.
Jeff's Sloppy Joes
- 1 chopped onion
- 2 pounds ground beef
- a couple cloves worth of chopped garlic
- 1, 15-ounce can of tomato sauce
- about a cup of cheap red wine
- a few good blobs of plain, yellow mustard (about a tablespoon, maybe 2)
- several dashes of Worcestershire sauce (probably 1 or 2 teaspoons)
1. Brown and crumble the ground beef with the onion; cook until the onion is translucent.
2. Stir in the garlic and tomato sauce; use the wine to rinse the tomato-sauce can and dump it into the mix.
3. Stir in the mustard and the Worcestershire sauce.
4. Simmer for 15 minutes or so.
