Tomato Sauce for the End of the World

The real sign of panic in Brooklyn: the Trader Joe’s had been ransacked.

This information came through in tweets, but also cautionary texts from friends. I’ve never really understood the appeal of Trader Joe’s—sorry, TJ’s, as people call it—but I do most of my shopping at the Korean grocery store near my apartment in Brooklyn or in Manhattan Chinatown. I walked into DNY Natural Land over the weekend and found it fully stocked. Earlier this week, I picked up some more food at Tan Tin Hung. If there’s a shortage of supplies, at least anti-Asian racism has kept my go-to’s full of the things I like to eat, pending quarantine or not.

Okay, that’s a little glib! I don’t think people are avoiding Asian grocery stores necessarily because of coronavirus. It’s more than the people who are panicking about food shortages are the kinds of people who only ever step inside of Trader Joe’s, a place where the best things you can buy are better-than-average frozen meals.

My response to coronavirus panic has been, admittedly, pretty smug. On one hand, there’s a lot of racism going on, which has been frustrating to witness when it’s people showing their asses, and straight up infuriating when it manifests as a hate crime. Or two. (You know things are bad when the NY Post is calling things for what they are.)

That said, I’ve been dunking on people who only shop at Trader Joe’s, partly because it’s funny to make fun of a certain kind of individual (y’know, white), but also for my own satisfaction. The people who love that place the most are the ones that don’t really cook and, in New York, have mostly relied on delivery and take-out to sustain themselves. That reeks of a kind of privilege. But it also makes sense that, right now, these are the people panicking the most, at least about not being able to eat. And if there’s a feeling I can sympathize with, it’s being hungry.

So: I’m going to blog about really simple recipes—and I mean the absolute simplest. Because that’s how I learned how to cook: reading food blogs from the ‘00s. And is there anything more to the spirit of this than reminding ourselves how much fun blogs used to be?

At the very least, maybe this can be WFH lunch inspiration.

Smitten Kitchen’s Tomato Sauce

I will be taking unflattering photos of food,
which is an aesthetic choice and not a reflection
of my inability to take a decent picture.

Serves 2 hungry people

Ingredients

• 28 oz can of whole peeled tomatoes
• ½ an onion
• 5 tablespoons unsalted butter
• whatever pasta you feel like

The blog that taught me the most about cooking was Smitten Kitchen. Its author, Deb Perelman, was doing that “take a nice photo of the food from above” thing before it became Instagram’s predominant aesthetic.

One of the first things I ever made from Smitten Kitchen is probably the thing I’ve been making most consistently for the past decade: tomato sauce with butter and onion, adapted from a Marcela Hazan recipe.

I’ve messed with fancier, more involved tomato sauces, and the truth is that I’ve never liked any of them as much as this one. It’s rich and fatty, but still bright and acidic. Not to say the complicated sauces out there aren’t better. It’s just that I’ve had this one so often throughout my life, it’s become the platonic ideal of tomato sauce for me. Oh, and also, depending on how much a can of San Marizanos are at your local grocery store, this meal could cost you less than $5 to make.

Anyway, making this is so simple it barely counts as cooking.

Combine the tomatoes, half onion, and butter in a pan and put it over medium heat till it simmers. Let it keep doing that for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. (I tend to go longer at a lower temperature, so the sauce isn’t splashing as much on my stove.) As the tomatoes break down, break them up with a wooden spoon.

Discard the onion. (Someone once said it felt wasteful, throwing the onion away. It’s already given you everything it has. Let it rest.)

Salt your sauce to taste.

Toss with pasta. Serve with cheese if you want, but if you probably won’t even need it.

Yeah, that’s really it!