If you visit an Italian market during the summer months, you will find tomatoes: Red shot with green for salads, cherry for salads and sauce, and... San Marzano, or plum tomatoes. Bins and bins of them, which people take home by the basketload to transform into tomato sauce -- what's called pomarola in Italy, and Marinara in the US. Much of it goes over pasta, and here are some of my favorite tomatoey pasta sauces. While they will be best with summer sun-ripened tomatoes, many can be made with canned tomatoes or tomato sauce too.
© Kyle Phillips, Licensed to About.ComIn mid-July they begin to arrive: Cases of freshly picked sun-ripened plum tomatoes, and Italian houses fill with anticipation, because there's no dish quite so refreshing on a hot day as a bowl of pasta seasoned with lots of freshly made pomarola and a handful of grated cheese. This recipe expands well, and most households make gallons of it when the flood of tomatoes reaches its peak in August, forcing the prices down. It can also be adapted to canned plum tomatoes.
Dino Romano took me to task for linking to a modern Italian (in Italian) marinara sauce recipe that took liberties he was right to object to, saying: "Even Neapolitans, known for some departures when it comes to plain tomato sauce, wouldn't use parsley and oregano AND onion mixed with garlic in a sauce." Here is his marinara sauce recipe. Actually, two marinara sauces, one with whole tomatoes and the other with pureed tomatoes.
Pasta alla Carrettiera means Cart-Driver's Sauce, and is the sort of thing one expects to find in a truck stop -- simple, tasty, and satisfying. It's usually pasta served with a spicy tomato sauce, though there are also unusual variations on the theme. This fairly traditional take is from Gabriella and Cristina, at the
Scuola di Arte Culinaria Cordon Bleu in Florence.
Arrabbiata means angry, and if made right these penne are spicy. Though the versions offered by the really cheap eateries in Rome rely primarily on garlic and hot pepper for their punch, many of the versions printed in cookbooks also call for pancetta (cured, unsmoked salt pork) and onions.
This zesty pancetta and tomato sauce is commonly associated with Lazio and Rome, but is actually from the town of Amatrice, which was just over the border into the Abruzzo before Mussolini redrew the maps.
There are a number of stories about the origins of puttanesca sauce, the raciest being that a Puttana, or Lady of the Evening, could cook it in the time it took her to take care of a client, and enjoy it while recovering from her exertions. Whatever, it is good.
In Tuscany, the word
sugo by itself means meat sauce. Sugo finto, mock meat sauce, is made like meat sauce, i.e. with the same herbs, but the meat is left out. It has a little more body than most tomato sauces, and is very nice.
When I was quite little my father worked on an excavation in Sicily, and Spaghetti alla Norma, spaghetti with rich, sensual tomatoey eggplant sauce, is one of the earliest dishes I remember. The Norma in question is Vincenzo Bellini's heroine, and the dish certainly does her justice.
Pici are hand-made, somewhat irregular strands of flour-and-water pasta (as opposed to egg pasta) that are about an eighth of an inch thick. Tradition is to serve them with a garlicky sauce. Really garlicky, and one gets an idea of just how garlicky from the name --
aglione means "big garlic."
This tomatoey pasta salad was a standby of Adriana Lotti, who was head of staff at the academic program my father directed for a number of years in Rome. It requires first-rate tomatoes and is wonderful when it's hot.
A delicate cream sauce with a pleasing blush from tomatoes, and all over pasta: This is good when you're in a rush, or if unexpected company stops in.
I know, Sugo alla Bolognese is bologna's classic winter meat sauce, and it doesn't contain much tomato. But it does have some, and is an excellent use for it. Also, you may grow old, even doddering, but if you know how to make a good sugo, people will still eagerly beat a path to your door.
