Rochester Hot Sauce

I grew up thinking hot dogs came with meat sauce.

Not sometimes.

Not as an optional topping.

That was simply what went on them.

My mother was from Rochester, New York, and she made what she called hot sauce. It was ground beef cooked down with chili powder, cayenne, paprika, black pepper, cloves, thyme and cinnamon until it became a loose, heavily seasoned meat sauce.

We put it on hot dogs.

I never questioned this.

Children accept a surprising number of things as universal simply because they happen in their own kitchen.

I also thought everybody's mother kept an old newspaper clipping with a hot sauce recipe in a drawer.

Apparently that wasn't universal either.

I discovered the hot dog problem when I was older and went into Chicago.

Chicago takes hot dogs very seriously.

This became apparent almost immediately.

The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot of things on one.

There was mustard.

There were onions.

There was relish.

There was tomato.

There was a pickle spear.

There were peppers.

There was celery salt.

It was served on a poppy-seed bun.

I spent some time looking at it before I ate it.

The tomato concerned me slightly.

Not because I dislike tomatoes.

I like tomatoes.

I was trying to determine whether adding tomato changed the classification of the hot dog in some way.

A hamburger can have tomato.

A sandwich can have tomato.

A hot dog can apparently also have tomato.

So the tomato itself proved nothing.

I eventually decided it was still a hot dog.

I don't remember how long this took.

Probably longer than necessary.

What it did not have was hot sauce.

At the time I thought this was unusual.

It turned out that I was the unusual one.

When I mentioned it to my mother, she explained that the hot sauce we ate came from Rochester.

That explained several conversations I'd had with people over the years.

It would have been useful information earlier.

Because outside of Rochester, when you ask someone for hot sauce, they normally hand you a bottle.

In Rochester, they may hand you ground beef.

More specifically, Rochester meat hot sauce is the seasoned meat sauce traditionally spooned over hot dogs, hamburgers and what Rochester is probably best known for: the plate.

Most people now know that dish as a Garbage Plate, although growing up I didn't hear much about the name itself. I knew the sauce.

A Rochester-style plate usually involves some combination of home fries, macaroni salad, meat, onions, mustard and hot sauce arranged together in a way that does not photograph especially well but makes considerably more sense once you start eating it.

The hot sauce is what ties the whole thing together.

And despite the name, Rochester-style hot sauce is not really a conventional hot sauce at all.

It isn't something you shake from a bottle.

It isn't smooth.

It isn't primarily made from peppers.

It's a thin, spicy meat sauce with a surprisingly complicated flavor.

The cinnamon and cloves are especially important.

You don't necessarily taste them individually.

If you leave them out, however, something is wrong.

My mother had an old newspaper clipping for the recipe.

The paper browned over the years and developed that particular smell old newspaper gets when it's been folded in a kitchen drawer for several decades.

The clipping described the first recipe as being like the hot sauce served at Nick Tahou's.

It also included another version similar to Bill Gray's.

My mother used the first one.

Eventually I copied it down because newspaper is not a particularly durable storage format.

I still make it essentially the same way.

It takes two hours.

This is not because anything particularly difficult happens during those two hours.

Mostly the sauce sits there.

But it needs the time.

The first hour is covered.

The second hour is uncovered.

This allows the meat and spices to cook together and the sauce to reduce into the loose texture it is supposed to have.

If you've only encountered chili on a hot dog, this will look familiar at first.

It doesn't taste like chili.

It isn't supposed to.

And if you're from Rochester, you already know that.

If you're not, this might explain why somebody from western New York once became strangely specific about what should be on your hot dog.

They weren't being difficult.

They were probably just raised incorrectly.

Like I was.