Innovation In Nonna’s Kitchen: Sauce from Semi-Scratch

I read somewhere recently that there are now more than 3,000 shapes and varieties of pasta.

For most of us, though, pasta means spaghetti, penne, rigatoni or shells, great food prepared for a meal by first boiling, then draining, followed by the addition of a favorite sauce - a sauce that in most parts of the world has a tomato base.

In Italy, pasta is revered, and pasta ingredients are regulated by law. The most important ingredient, of course, is the grain that is crushed and powdered because the only other ingredient is water. Durum wheat flour or Durum wheat semolina is lightly moistened, shaped and dried. In my native country, if you add anything else, it’s not pasta.

Not so long ago, for me and most of the world, preparing a pasta dish for the family was hard work - because the real flavor comes from the sauce. And, a good sauce requires five or more very important, fresh vegetables—onions, celery, carrots, tomatoes and garlic.

It didn’t take me long to discover that making tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes wasn’t necessary with so many very good tomato sauces available in the grocery. I chopped the other vegetables, added them to tomato sauce warming on the stove, added a tablespoon or more of olive oil and topped that with a splash of lambrusco wine. In Italy, we call this sauce “marinara,” just as we do in North America.

With a husband who likes to eat and five ravenous children, I rarely finished my sauce project there. I crumbled a pound of good lean ground beef, simmered it in olive oil until it was well-cooked, and added that to my marinara, effectively changing the name of the sauce to bolognese.

That was the routine years ago, but not anymore. Recently, my eldest daughter brought me a jar of Paul Newman’s Marinara that she bought at Hiller’s Market, and I bolognesed it!

I’m surprised at how good it was. I didn’t know Newman was Italian.

- written by Margarita Feldman

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