some basic pasta sauses

it’s a debate like the chicken and the egg, what’s more important: the pasta or the sauce?

Is pasta just the logical base for a great stew, or is the sauce just an aftertought that might enhage a beautifully worked sculpture in dough?

In this chapter we come down on the side of the sauce (having taken the other side elseware on this web). We discuss some classic accompaniments, dressings and condiments that can be made separatly, kept and used whenever a dish needs elevation.

You’ll encounter words such as sugo, salsa and ragu here, used to indicate variations in a way Italians describe sauces: a ragu (or tocco in Ligurian dialect) is usually a meat sauce; a sugo is a thin sauce, often tomato; and a salsa is a thicker vegetable sauce containg pieces of vegetable, not pureed.

We begin, naturally, with the king of sauces – pesto, which is the pride of Liguria.