Photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman.
This is my new favorite cookbook. I've long made a fuss about not liking cookbooks, because I don't. Cookbooks are too often about recipes, and that's not what cooking is about. I tried to write an anti-cookbook, Ratio, that intended to help the home cook rely on proportions and technique rather than recipes. It had a ton of recipes in it anyway (editor request). I admired books with a genuine voice, David Lebovitz's books, Judi Rodgers's Zuni Cafe Cookbook. Well-written cookbooks. I didn't dislike recipes per se. I still rely on a page torn from Saveur with a fabulous falafel recipe—too many ingredients to remember, let alone their proportions. I have to look at my own recipe for fried chicken to make the seasoned flour (included in the above book above, happily).
So what is it about this book that I find so compelling I read it half through once I turned its first pages? First, Kristen Miglore, aka @miglorious, executive ed of the gorgeous Food52.com, has a distinctive, young, inquisitive personality that comes through on the page. The photography by James Ransom is excellent. The design is clean and the prose and recipes are easy to read. But really, I know what it is and I'm almost ashamed to admit it. I know what it is that I love. It's the ... recipes.
Yep, I find the recipes FASCINATING. We'll be at the 92nd Street Y tonight at 7 p.m. exploring the idea of a "genius" recipe. But Miglorius has something with the concept and it's precisely the fact that the genius of it is so hard to isolate that makes this book so intriguing. OK, so I'm sure April Bloomfield's English Porridge is excellent, as are David Chang's Brussels sprouts—hell, even my own fried chicken is delicious. But it's not clear why any of these are "genius" recipes. On the other hand, and these are in the majority, she gives you: the one-ingredient corn butter from Whitney Wright, Michel Richard's Onion Carbonara, Roy Finamore's broccoli "confit," and they are just so interesting I couldn't stop turning pages.
What I think I love is that so many of these recipes are counterintuitive, or so obvious I wondered why I didn't already know what they had to teach. For instance, the first recipe is from the famed Michelin-starred Roger Vergé: Fried Eggs with Wine Vinegar. Yep, it's exactly what it says it is, basically three fried eggs (Vergé's preferred quantity) with browned butter and a heavy shot of vinegar. Never would have thought. First recipe in the book. LOVE!
These recipes come from old lights and new, from old cookbooks and contemporary chefs, a great big sharing. The following tomato sauce I have been making for 20 years. It was a revelation when I first made it and remains a revelation, and I was grateful to be reunited with it here, in my new favorite cookbook.
Tomato Sauce with Butter & Onion
from Marcella Hazan
“Simple doesn’t mean easy,” Marcella Hazan wrote in 2004, a quote widely cited to explain her cooking style and influence. “I can describe simple cooking thus: Cooking that is stripped all the way down to those procedures and those ingredients indispensable in enunciating the sincere flavor intentions of a dish.”
In her famous tomato sauce, all you do is simmer tomatoes for 45 minutes with butter and a split onion. The full, true tomato flavor is a revelation, as is finding out you don’t need to cook in layers of garlic and herbs to get there (and you’re better off without them).
The recipe has found new life online, as bloggers have zeroed in on the fact that Hazan’s recipe is well suited to a can of whole, peeled tomatoes. It does make an excellent year-round sauce that way. But fresh tomatoes are really just better—they turn into sauce that tastes like pure summer, to stock your freezer.
Unless you like a sauce with lots of texture, they’ll require one extra, rather satisfying step: peeling. See the genius techniques at right for your options. You then simmer away with the swirling butter and bobbing onion, until “the fat floats free from the tomato”— which, of course, you should just stir back in. Then Hazan has you remove the onion, but it’s too good not to eat—in the pasta or on its own.
Other links you may like:
- Other recent posts: Taking Back Our Pasta, How to Make a Mushroom Sauce without a Recipe, and Cooked Marinades.
- Food52’s cooking series called Not Recipes.
- Check out my award-winning cookbook Ruhlman’s Twenty.
© 2015 Michael Ruhlman. Photo © 2015 Donna Turner Ruhlman. All rights reserved.
TOMATO SAUCE WITH BUTTER & ONION
Ingredients
- 2 pounds (900g) fresh, ripe tomatoes, prepared as described at right, or 2 cups (480g) canned imported Italian tomatoes, cut up, with their juice
- 5 tablespoons (70g) butter
- 1 medium onion, peeled and cut in half
- Salt
- 1 to 11⁄2 pounds (450 to 680g) pasta, cooked, for serving
- Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, for serving
Instructions
- Put either the prepared fresh tomatoes or the canned in a saucepan; add the butter, onion, and salt; and cook, uncovered, at a very slow, but steady simmer for about 45 minutes, or until it is thickened to your liking and the fat floats free from the tomato. Stir from time to time, mashing up any large pieces of tomato with the back of a wooden spoon.
- Taste and correct for salt. Discard the onion before tossing with pasta. Serve with freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese for the table.
I recently acquired this book and it is also my new favorite book. I think that what makes this book "genius" is the layout, the awesome feel of the hardcover, the simply simple delicious recipes, the pictures, and the stories behind every single recipe. I've already tried the fried eggs with vinegar and it's amazing. On a side note, I have many of your books Michael, and they are all fantastic. I also have your wooden and stainless spoons and they are marvelous. Keep on cookin!
Good lord, Ruhlman! Why don't I have this book?! Not only does every recipe I read sound delicious, I have all the ingredients already. Or I've got something else that would work. This, IMO, earns extra genius points.
Thanks for sharing!
I suppose you could also use the box grater method for the tomatoes (which may be similar to the food mill)? Cut the tomatoes in half and grate the cut side on the big holes on a box grater. Quick and easy to clean.
i hate when people ask me for my recipe....if u know what i mean...but i would like at least one of your books...
I love this pasta recipe!
Lovely to see my mum's recipe here! No, my mum is not Marcella, but this is a recipe she made when I was a child. She was just a few years younger than Marcella, so I guess this belonged to their generation. I like to think they both cook for the angels now and are sorely missed among us.
This recipe certainly does sound great! Thank you!
I have to agree about the onion. I dice it and leave it in.
http://goo.gl/irgkpR
Off the subject, but it does include chickens for dinner. Showtime is re airing Eraserhead.
Every time I eat a Cornish game hen I say "dambdest little things" and think of the dinner scene with the plumber father.
Crazy and abstract, as life should be.
Maddonadelpiatto, you are the star of the comments. Had I read, I would not have even posted my own at this time, Bon gusto, to you and your mama.
I love that you followed up the pasta recipe with this sauce recipe! Now I am doubly pleased that your last post got me to break out the pasta maker 🙂
Easy, simple and delicious!
I'll only make tomato sauce like this from now on out.
This post was the tipping point for me; after I read this, I got the cookbook. The first thing I made was Fried Eggs with Wine Vinegar, and it was superb.
I frizzled some speck in the frying pan pan, removed the speck, and continued with the recipe exactly as written. Next time I will try it with olive oil instead of butter (only because I like my eggs cooked in OO better), and I will lift the eggs out of the pan rather than sliding them onto the plate, ensuring more of the fat stays in the pan to commingle with the vinegar.
This one's a real keeper, and it will work for breakfast, lunch, or dinner!
Yes, Marcella's miracle sauce is a revelation. I, too, have made it for years. I like to serve spaghetti or rigatoni in this sauce with frozen Fordhook limas cooked in heavy cream on the side. Sounds crazy, but it's a delicious combination - good enough for unexpected company.
P.S. I know your fried chicken made it into this book, and it IS delicious, but to me your recipe for Pan-Fried Chicken Thighs is the true genius recipe. They are absolutely scrumptious and are in my regular rotation. Thank you so much for that recipe (and too many others to list here).
Would you use this sauce in a osso buco?
Beautiful book, thanks for the rec. Quite a few recipes I want to try. I did make the applesauce this morning and the apples were crisp and hard after both baking times. My oven is correct and the apples were not particularly hard. I ended up cooking for more than double the time and they were ok but why such a divergence in cooking times? I do make normal stove top applesauce weekly with these apples and have no problems. Still, a lovely book with some interesting tips. Thank you.
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Genius is right! So often, simple is better!!!!