Cookbook review by Tracey Zabar
This amazing cookbook is bursting with over one thousand recipes. You will be cooking through the book for years. Buy the book to get the marinara recipe. Your repertoire needs that one too. Next on my list: baked mushrooms from 1877; sweet potato Cecelia; Lee Lum’s lemon chicken; the classic purple plum torte; and the world’s best chocolate cake.
Excerpted from The Essential New York Times Cookbook: The Recipes of Record, 10th Anniversary Edition. Compilation copyright (c) 2021, 2010 by The New York Times Company and Amanda Hesser. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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MARCEL LA HAZAN’ S TOMATO SAUCE
Sometimes the pleasure in cooking comes from dispelling a long-held belief. In 2012, a year before Marcella Hazan, the nonna of all nonnas, passed away, food blogs lit up with versions of this tomato sauce from Hazan’s first collection, The Classic Italian Cook Book. Though the recipe had been in print for years, its ease and genius had been overlooked, or at least temporarily forgotten. Even after the Italian cooking craze of the 1990s, red sauce was still considered a labor intensive, slow-simmering enterprise. Leave it to Hazan, whose no-nonsense air both daunted and appealed to her fans, to let us know we were all wrong. She told us the best tomato sauce is just canned tomatoes from your pantry, a lump of butter, and a halved onion, all simmered gently together.
2 cups tomatoes, with their juices (for example, a 28-ounce can of San Marzano whole peeled tomatoes)
5 tablespoons butter
1 onion, peeled and cut in half
Salt
1. Combine the tomatoes, their juices, butter, and onion halves in a saucepan. Add a pinch or two of salt. Place over medium heat and bring to a simmer. Cook, uncovered, for about 45 minutes. Stir occasionally, mashing any large pieces of tomato with a spoon. Add more salt as needed.
2. Chop up the onion and add it to the sauce before tossing the sauce with pasta. This recipe makes enough sauce for a pound of pasta.
SERVES 4
COOKING NOTES
The butter and onion are essentially flavoring tools to mellow and soften the tomatoes’ acidic edge. You won’t think about the butter and onion when you’re eating, because they’re so subtle, but they make the sauce. The recipe can easily be doubled or tripled, and it freezes well. I use Pomì chopped tomatoes; please use the best canned tomatoes you can find. If you’re making this during tomato season, substitute 2 pounds fresh tomatoes, chopped, for the canned.
SERVING SUGGESTION
You could swap this sauce in for the marinara in Rao’s Meatballs
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