Tomato Sauce

History

The tomato reached Italy from the Spanish Americas in the sixteenth century, first noted by the botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli in 1544, who called the golden-fruited varieties pomi d'oro, apples of gold. Acceptance was slow: for nearly two centuries the fruit was grown as an ornamental curiosity and eyed with suspicion, its acidity blamed for sickening the wealthy from their pewter and lead plates while peasants ate safely from wood and clay. The first printed tomato sauce came in 1692, in Antonio Latini's Lo Scalco alla Moderna, a Naples steward's salsa di pomodoro alla spagnola of roasted, skinned tomatoes with onion, chili, oil, salt and vinegar, served as a condiment beside meat and fish rather than over pasta. The pairing with pasta is first recorded a century later, in Francesco Leonardi's L'Apicio Moderno of 1790, and by the mid-nineteenth century maccheroni al pomodoro had become a Neapolitan fixture. Artusi's 1891 version stands at the end of that arc: a cooked, sieved sauce of tomatoes, onion, garlic, celery, basil and parsley, offered for boiled meats, pasta and risotto. His famous headnote likens the fruit's all-pervasiveness to a meddlesome Romagnol priest the townsfolk nicknamed Don Pomodoro, because tomatoes get into everything.

Ingredients

• onion
• clove garlic
• finger-length piece celery
• leaves basil
• parsley
• olive oil
• tomatoes
• salt and pepper

Instructions

1. Make a battuto of onion, garlic, celery, basil, and parsley; season with a little oil, salt, and pepper.
2. Break up seven or eight tomatoes, add them, and cook everything together, stirring occasionally.
3. When thickened to a liquid cream, pass through a sieve. Use with boiled meat, dressed pasta with cheese and butter, or for risotto (No. 77).