Cook This Now: Your New Red Sauce Standby, With Pancetta and Beans
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I go through phases with tomato sauce, but for a long time I was deeply committed to Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan’s famously simple recipe: tomatoes simmered with a halved onion and a good amount of butter. Like so many cooks, I loved this elegant sauce because it got right down to the sweet, essential, tomato-ness of it all. And it helped me figure out that frying garlic and melting anchovies into the pan, along with all of the other stuff I like to mess around with when making tomato sauce, wasn’t strictly necessary.
Then I followed a more complex tomato sauce recipe in Thomas McNaughton’s beautiful new cookbook, “Flour and Water: Pasta” and everything changed.