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. ADVERTISING We’ve lost the woman who taught America to love Italian food, but her tomato sauce
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.
