We’ve lost the woman who taught America to love Italian food, but her tomato sauce may soon live on at a grocer near you.
We’ve lost the woman who taught America to love Italian food, but her tomato sauce may soon live on at a grocer near you.
Marcella Hazan — often unfairly called the “Julia Child of Italian cooking,” for she certainly was a culinary icon in her own right — spent decades producing cookbooks and television that taught generations of home cooks to appreciate the nuances of regional Italian cooking. Yet it is a deceptively simple, four-ingredient tomato sauce recipe for which Hazan — who died in 2013 — may be best known.
Her transformative assemblage of tomatoes, butter, onion and salt has become one of the most popular recipes online. And now her son, Giuliano Hazan, has created a Kickstarter campaign to make to make it even easier for people to taste her sauce. The campaign — which runs through April 25 and aims to raise $48,500 — would launch a jarred sauce line called “Marcella’s Classic Italian Tomato Sauce.”
Giuliano Hazan says the jarred sauces faithfully recreate his mother’s recipe. And if the first sauce is a success, he plans to launch others based on her recipes.
To see how the product stands up to Marcella Hazan’s recipe made from scratch, we did a tasting that pitted them against one another served over the same pasta. Side-by-side, the sauces we equally delicious — simple, buttery and rich with tomato flavor. The jarred sauce was slightly smoother than the batch we made, possibly a little saltier, but none of that was a detriment.
Which is to say, if you want a real deal Italian pasta sauce, but are too busy to whip up even a four-ingredient recipe, this may well have you covered.