This simple pasta sauce from legendary Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan is a lazy person’s dream.
The most famous recipe from Marcella Hazan, the famed Italian cookery writer, is a simple tomato sauce. Its name and ingredients are identical — tomato sauce with onion and butter.
I first came across it in 2010 when my favourite food blogger, Deb Perelman, posted it on Smitten Kitchen. Her photo made it look appealing, but it was merely a ladle of tomato sauce on spaghetti. Could something so basic be that good?
And a decade later, when I shared a snap of the sauce simmering on my stove, a friend messaged me expressing the same scepticism. The answer is a resounding yes.
While I’m no cooking expert like Hazan, I believe this is exactly how tomato sauce should taste — jammy, vibrant, and naturally sweet. It can certainly serve as a base for more complex dishes, but as the epitome of tomato sauce, it works perfectly on its own.
It’s a lazy person’s dream. The sauce can be whipped up from three ingredients I almost always have. It’s a one pot recipe and you don’t even have to dice an onion. That’s why it’s been a mainstay in our cooking repertoire for nearly 15 years.
As I later discovered, Hazan was a legendary cookery writer. My copy of her most famous book, The Essentials of Italian Cooking, is one of my most treasured possessions. Marcella, as I affectionately call her, is the only person who could persuade me to devote an entire day to making bolognese.
But I digress. This recipe isn’t that — it’s incredibly straightforward. Some might consider this blasphemous, but over the years, I’ve grown to prefer it with a fourth ingredient: a parmesan rind.
The sauce is given a depth of flavour and deliciousness that makes it my favourite pasta sauce. When we’ve run out of parmesan rinds (which we store in the freezer specifically for this recipe), I can certainly 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,” Hazan penned. “I have known people to skip the pasta and eat the sauce directly out of the pot with a spoon.”
She hailed it as an “unsurpassed” sauce for potato gnocchi, but it’s also nice 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, to taste
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.