Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter

Basically, this is a very nice sauce. I do find pure tomato sauce a little boring, so I added some fried chopped onions and mincemeat during the last ten minutes (could be earlier, though). Adding the mincemeat meant that the sauce lost some its simplicity of taste and tasted slightly less velvety; perhaps adding flakes of bacon and some red or green pepper might be a more suitable choice to spice up this sauce. Or try it as it is!

Otherwise, I think it's a very good sauce that you can also use for other pasta dishes - e.g. make some extra sauce and use it as a tomato sauce for lasagna the following week (bring it to a boil and fill it into a large jar - my guess is that this way you should be able to keep the sauce some 2-4 weeks).

The same recipe has already appeared in other blogs, as Deb acknowledges, for instance Orangette, Rachel Eats and The Amateur Gourmet. Originally from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.

Edited 7 March 2010: Ah, I gave it another try (what else should you do on a Sunday evening when you originally had other eating plans) and I was disappointed again... This time it didn't taste very velvety, or at least not velvety enough to make up for the fact that it was actually quite plain. It made a great base for my favourite spaghetti sauce, though, with onions, garlic, red and green bell peppers, ham and ...

Edited 24 January 2012: I actually canned a few jars of tomato sauce back in July 2011 - just poured the boiling hot sauce into sterilized jars up to the rim and closed them properly - and then used them in a pasta dish this week. The sauce was delicious as always, not a bit spoiled, and made DH crack jokes that it had 'ripened', and that next time we should use oak barrels.

In any case: this can make an ideal gift for people who will be short on time or cooking resources for a while - kids going to college, people under time pressure to finish a project, new mothers, people whose kitchen is getting renovated and who have to rely on a camping pit in the meantime (they'll need it for the pasta..), you name it.

Edited 29 June 2013: On second thought... Read this before you decide to can any tomato sauce.