Cooking
Its luscious simplicity is the draw: All you need are canned tomatoes, an onion cut in half, butter, salt and time.
Hi. Sam’s summering somewhere on an island in the Atlantic. I’m summering here at my desk, where the food news never stops.
About five years before the Italian cook Marcella Hazan died, I had the good fortune to spend an afternoon interviewing her at her condo in the Florida Keys. She was in her mid-80s, still enjoying her Marlboro Lights and a shot of Gentleman Jack whiskey in the afternoons.
And she was still complaining about American supermarkets. Her critique of her local Publix remains one of the highlights of my food reporting career. Which was worse — that a food market offered inflatable alligator beach toys or that it sold giant globe artichokes?
“I never saw artichokes in my life like this,” she told me. “It’s better because it’s bigger? What am I supposed to do with this?”
Still, we turned them and some other food from the grocery store into a simple baked pasta dish with some Gulf shrimp.
Even if you don’t know who Marcella Hazan is, you probably know her most famous recipe. It’s a dead-simple sauce of tomatoes, onions and butter that she first published in “The Classic Italian Cook Book” in 1973. She titled it Tomato Sauce III.
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