A little tale about pasta sauce
When I was a kid they came out with Ragu. We never had Ragu in our house. I’m reminded of this one-woman show Julia Sweeney did called, “God Said Ha”. In it she talks about how if she mentioned pasta marinara to her parents, her mother would look confused and say, “you mean the noodles with the red topping?” It was kind of like that in my house. “Marinara, what the heck is that?” But when Ragu came out and I had it for the first time, OMG! That stuff was the bomb! I was crazy for it. I told my mother, “we’ve got to get some Ragu!” her reply was short and to the point, “No”. Oh, I was so ill-treated. Meanwhile I’d mooch off my friends when they had spaghetti for dinner, all because my mean old mommy deprived me of it. Our “marinara” was tomato sauce. My mother didn’t feel it needed to be any fancier than that and we really couldn’t afford it. I joke about it, but things were really that bad. Ragu was a $1.59 then and tomato sauce was $.35.
Now that I’m older, I’ve taken a really good look at Ragu, I’m a pretty good cook and can make a mean marinara, but I hadn’t used Ragu since my late teens simply because my tastes had sophisticated enough that Ragu just doesn’t do it for me anymore. But I began to wonder what was it about Ragu and the other “pasta sauces” that turned me on so? Sugar. Duh? I had no idea till I looked at the ingredients. Naturally I craved it, I was a kid and it was sweet.
It seems strange to me now that anyone would think to put sugar or corn syrup in a pasta sauce, but of course they put it in just about everything. The strange thing I realize now is our tomato sauce was SO much better. Really I cannot imagine some of the recipes in this book with a pasta sauce. It would just ruin it. Now today I don’t use tomato SAUCE, I use crushed and diced tomatoes. It’s somewhat less processed and less sugar, also you get more tomato flavor. I think a marinara should be pretty simple and straightforward.
If you decide to try some of the marinara pasta recipes, be sure to use either crushed (preferred) or diced. Please don’t use a pasta sauce, it’s not the same. You may swear by Ragu and just to be clear I still like Ragu & Prego or any of the other pasta sauces, but I just now realize how much value it really has and I think my mom was right.