tomato sauce (i)
This recipe started out as the first of five tomato sauces (sughi di pomodoro) in The Classic Italian Cookbook, 1973 and is the fullest flavoured of them. It can be made with fresh tomatoes (which require at least an hour’s preliminary simmering) but it also works very well with imported tinned Italian plum tomatoes. Indeed, I don’t prefer the fresh option (except, perhaps, at the very peak of the season).
Chopped onion, carrot and celery are gently sautéed in olive oil before being combined with either chopped tinned tomatoes or fresh ones previously simmered and reduced. The original recipe called for the tomatoes to be put through a food mill, to separate the pulp from the skins and seeds, and while that suggestion didn’t carry over into the revised recipe in Essentials, it’s a good one. The sauce is reduced by steady simmering for about 45 minutes (until the oil starts to visibly separate from the sauce) and then it is simply tossed with the chosen pasta. If you make more than is required for one meal, it freezes well.
… a denser, darker sauce.
Marcella Hazan
Hazan’s preferred pasta choices are factory-made rigatoni, ridged penne or bucatini.
This is a simple sauce but it has a real depth of flavour. It can be made all year round and can be matched with almost any type of dried pasta. There’s an unwritten rule that oil-based sauces with tomato work best with spaghettini – thin spaghetti – but here, bucatini (the thick, but hollow, spaghetti) works particularly well. Hazan makes no mention of serving the finished dish with grated cheese, and it doesn’t need any.
This dish is featured in the pasta chapter of Marcella Hazan’s The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Macmillan, 1992). This blog aims to illustrate and describe each pasta recipe from the book.
Classic Pasta Dishes 