Nothing beats a well-made pasta dish, and sometimes the most delicious are the easiest to make.
In fact, the world's best pasta sauce boasts just the ingredients, and can be made when you're desperately looking for dinner ideas when your cupboards are stripped bare.
The delicious tomato pasta sauce in question belongs to Marcella Hazan, an Italian American food writer who was born in Cesenatico, Italy, in 1924 and went on to open a New York cookery school and write hugely respected cookbooks.
According to the chef's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, three ingredients are required for a good pasta sauce: tinned tomatoes, an onion and a generous knob butter.
The 1992 recipe is still revered by food writers and cooks alike. It's a go-to meal for big family dinners as absolutely no chopping is required and it's very cheap to make.
Marcella, who died in 2013, provided precise instructions for the sauce, too. You should put half a peeled onion into a pot with butter and tinned tomatoes and leave it all to simmer for 45 minutes.
Food publication Delish dubbed the sauce "the best in the world."
Her husband Victor talked to Epicurious about her efficient methods: "Marcella was a genius when it came to taste. She had an immediate understanding about how flavour affects a dish.
"She asked herself, 'Why chop an onion? Why sauté? I'm going to put the onion, tomato, and butter together and forget about it'."
It's bold to claim this is the best sauce in the world as that is a subjective matter but Italians are famous for their simplicity in cooking. It's all about the produce – tomatoes being one of the most important.
"No other preparation is more successful in delivering the prodigious satisfactions of Italian cooking than a competently executed sauce with tomatoes," Marcella says in her book.
Her sauce is very rich, putting the natural flavours at the forefront of the taste. Others favour different techniques, chefs like Jamie Oliver add four cloves of garlic and garnish with fresh basil.
Meanwhile, BBC Good Food recommends starting with a classic mirepoix base (diced onions, celery, carrot), and scores of top chefs use various herbs and oils and other trickery to elevate their dishes.
Food writer Felicity Cloake suggests the more classic use of olive oil in tomato sauce. She also puts in a pinch of sugar and some red wine vinegar.
The thing to do is experiment. Garlic or no garlic, parsley or thyme or basil or rosemary, as long as the tinned tomatoes are good and there's parmesan on the table, we imagine people will be well fed.
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