This Famously Simple 4-Ingredient Tomato Sauce Will Change How You Cook Pasta

There are dishes that take a lot of time, effort, and expertise to pull off (like the peak crispiness of Peking duck, perfectly airy brioche donuts, or a really excellent croissant, where the luscious layers are so beautiful, you just want to sink into them and melt away with the butter). These are places where shortcuts either don't work at all or, if they technically do, they don't yield anywhere near the same result. For many home cooks (even the most advanced among us), these are the dishes we tackle and perfect for special occasions, but they're not in our weeknight canon. 

However, there's one special sauce that not only gives us the joy of those more time- and skill-required dishes, but it's also so amazingly simple that we put it on repeat in our kitchens ad infinitum, regardless of special occasion or weekday status. It's Marcella Hazan's tomato sauce with onion and butter from her much-beloved cookbook, "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking." 

This four-ingredient sauce is so deliciously flavor-packed you won't believe the end results. One slurp from your stirring spoon and you'll know how vibrantly rich, comfortingly silky, and nuanced its echoing flavors and their interplay are. It's a culinary epiphany that will leave you questioning — how? How is this just butter, tomatoes, onion, and salt? This is a revelation that will no doubt transform the way you cook and eat pasta (and maybe everything else) moving forward, even gifting you a secret ingredient to take pasta to the next level.

Cook enough and you'll hear something like, "The best dishes are just fresh ingredients, cooked simply." Marcella Hazan's sauce exemplifies this idea. Though the very best version of this sauce does, indeed, use "2 pounds of fresh, ripe tomatoes," as described in "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking," Hazan isn't so fussy as to insist upon their freshness, offering an alternative in "2 cups of canned imported, Italian plum tomatoes, cut up with their juice," in place of inferior, "watery," fresh tomatoes. Using canned tomatoes, this sauce comes together elegantly in little time. Its 45-minute, "slow but steady simmer" takes up the bulk, allowing time to prepare and dress a simple salad, stirring your sauce here and there, smashing tomatoes, and aiding in their breakdown. There's even time to make warm garlic bread or take a break to read a few pages of a good book.

What goes in with those tomatoes? Five tablespoons of butter, 1 medium onion (halved), and salt to taste. Once everything has cooked down, mingled, and coalesced, magnifying the tomatoes' intrinsic sweetness, Hazan instructs us to "discard the onion" before tossing with pasta. This is something few cooks would do. Instead, you could blend that tomato-stewed onion into the sauce, heightening its savory flavor, or keep the prize for yourself, cutting through those delicately tender-sweet layers with a fork, enjoying them with a bit of bread and wine as a reward for your efforts. Whichever you choose, in cooking this sauce, you'll have learned the invaluable lessons of slowness, intention, and the simple pleasures of the kitchen.