Marcella Hazan’s most famous recipe is just a plain tomato sauce. Its name and its ingredient list are one and the same — tomato sauce with onion and butter.
It came to my attention in 2010 when my favourite food blogger, Deb Perelman, shared it on Smitten Kitchen. Her picture made it look lovely, but it was simply just a dollop of tomato sauce on spaghetti. Could something plain be that nice? And 10 years later, when I posted a picture of the sauce bubbling away on my hob, my friend messaged me with the same doubts.
The answer is yes. Obviously I’m no Italian food expert like Hazan, but I feel it’s exactly how tomato sauce should taste, jammy, bright and with a natural sweetness.
It can serve as a building block to more, sure, but as the Platonic ideal of tomato sauce, it works as is and comes together in a pinch with ingredients I almost always have on hand. That’s why it’s been a staple in our cooking rotation for going on 15 years.
As I came to learn, Hazan was a legendary Italian cookbook author. My copy of her most famous book, The Essentials of Italian Cooking, is one of my most cherished. Marcella, as I like to call her, is the only person who could convince me to dedicate a whole day to cooking bolognese.
But I digress. This recipe is not that — it’s dead easy. Some people might consider this sacriligious, but through the years, I’ve come to prefer it with a fourth ingredient: a parmesan rind.
It gives the sauce an depth of flavour and deliciousness that makes it my favourite pasta sauce. In the times we’ve run out of parmesan rinds (we pop them in the freezer for this specific recipe), I can tell the difference and miss it.
“This is the simplest of all sauces to make, and none has a purer more irresistibly sweet tomato taste,” wrote Hazan. “I have known people to skip the pasta and eat the sauce directly out of the pot with a spoon.”
She dubbed it an “unsurpassed” sauce for potato gnocchi, but also delicious with spaghetti, penne or rigatoni.
Marcella Hazan’s tomato pasta sauce recipe
Adapted from The Essentials of Italian Cooking
Ingredients
Two 400g tins of whole peeled tomatoes, cut up, with their juice
5 tablespoons (70 grams) of butter
1 medium onion, peeled and cut in half
Salt
Method
Put tinned tomatoes in a saucepan, add the butter, onion, and salt, and cook uncovered at a very slow, but steady simmer for 45 minutes, or until the fat floats free from the tomato.
Stir from time to time, mashing any large pieces of tomato in the pan with the back of a wooden spoon.
Taste and correct for salt.
Discard the onion before tossing the sauce with pasta.
Serve with grated Parmesan.