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‘I tend to stick to whole plum tomatoes, usually firm-fleshed Italian San Marzano.’
‘I tend to stick to whole plum tomatoes, usually firm-fleshed Italian San Marzano.’ Photograph: Rachel Roddy/The Guardian
‘I tend to stick to whole plum tomatoes, usually firm-fleshed Italian San Marzano.’ Photograph: Rachel Roddy/The Guardian

Rachel Roddy’s winter tomato sauce recipe

The ingredients may be few, but the flavour is plentiful – and it’s all about the tinned tomatoes

For several years now, I have used an empty tomato tin as a pen holder on my desk. Even though it rarely contains a pen or pencil that actually works – it’s more a receptacle for estranged lids and coins – the picture on the tin, a trio of bright-red plum tomatoes, makes me happy every time it catches my eye. It’s the same feeling I get when I open the kitchen cupboard and see a half-dozen tins and bottles, their tomato-emblazoned labels reminders of the sun, which is especially welcome in January. I find taking a tin of plum tomatoes from the shelf a reassuring thing, too. It’s the palm-filling size and familiar weight, the knowledge that the contents, which bellyflop into a pan, are constant and that you are halfway to dinner.

You do need to know your tomatoes, though. As with anything, this means trying and tasting and finding a brand you like, and that suits your pocket. When it comes to the tinned variety, I tend to stick to whole plum tomatoes, usually Italian San Marzano – firm-fleshed and with just a bit of juice. These are never the cheapest, but neither are they the most expensive. Bless whoever invented the key that allows you to roll back the lid, especially satisfying with the 800g tins. When I’m opening one of those, it’s probably for tomato sauce, which is probably destined for pasta.

There are innumerable ways to make tomato sauce. Growing up, however, I thought there was only one: the sauce my mum used to make, a Jane Grigson recipe for which she softened onions, added several tins of tomatoes and a glug of wine, then left it to bubble until it was a duffel coat of a sauce. On the south coast of Sicily, my partner, the grandson of tomato farmers, thought the smooth salsa with basil that his grandmother made in industrial quantities was the only way. It was Marcella Hazan who showed me that there are many others in between. In The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking she includes 11 tomato sauces, from the simplest to the more complex: smooth or chunky; those where the carrot, celery and onion foundation is fried in olive oil; others where it is not. She shows how pancetta, anchovies, butter, porcini, fresh basil and dried oregano can deepen flavour and change the nature of the sauce. She notes which are best made with fresh tomatoes and which with tinned (and when they are interchangeable). Marcella is firm. Following her recipes is the cooking equivalent of learning 11 chords with which you can play and improvise sauces for every season.

It is Hazan’s tomato sauce with butter and onion that I associate most with winter, when cold days and dark nights require comfort. The simplest and most brilliantly spare of all her recipes requires only that an 800g tin of plum tomatoes, 100g butter, a peeled onion cut in half and a pinch of salt are simmered together with the odd stir. It seems everyday alchemy. After 40 minutes, you have a rich, velvety sauce, pure-tasting and savoury, soothing and delicious – and one of the best reasons to pull a large tin from the shelf. Pull a 500g packet of spaghetti or rigatoni from the shelf, too, and you’re ready to go.

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