Sauce

Not only is this sauce delicious with meat loaf, it also goes well with roasted chicken or salmon.

Eggplant, zucchini, sweet onions, and tomatoes all roasted together thicken by themselves to make a deeply flavored sauce for pasta. It’s a meal that’s ready in less than half an hour.

If you make this ahead of time, keep it refrigerated but bring it to room temperature before serving.

This is a quickly assembled dipping sauce from ingredients you might have on hand.

The difference between marinara sauce and tomato sauce is this: Marinara is a quick sauce, seasoned only with garlic, pepper, and, if you like, basil or oregano. The pieces of tomato are left chunky, and the texture of the finished sauce is fairly loose. Tomato sauce, on the other hand, is a more complex affair, starting with puréed tomatoes and seasoned with onion, carrot, celery, and bay leaf, and left to simmer until thickened and rich in flavor. Make this sauce with fresh tomatoes only when the juiciest, most flavorful ripe tomatoes are available. (Increase the amount of olive oil a little if you make the sauce with fresh tomatoes.) Otherwise, canned plum tomatoes make a delicious marinara sauce.

Just a small amount of saffron can imbue extra-virgin olive oil with the spice’s captivating perfume and distinctive flavor. This versatile condiment is a great way to bring a light and seductive touch of saffron to your dishes, without overwhelming them. It makes a delicious (and colorful) dressing for maccheroni alla chitarra (page 236) or other pasta, or to season almost any mild-flavored dish.

This recipe actually gives you two flavorful sauces, to use as a dressing for pasta or to give a fresh accent to all sorts of dishes, from steamed vegetables to roasted meats. The basic sauce is a simple, loose parsley pesto, quite good and easily whipped up any time of year. In summer, I cut ripe, sweet tomatoes into small pieces and mix them into the pesto. The juices and flesh of the tomatoes merge with the parsley sauce, creating a new dressing with multiple dimensions of flavor and texture.

This distinctively flavored pesto is a superb dressing for maccheroni alla chitarra (page 236), spaghetti, or linguine, or a short dry pasta such as gemelli, lumache, or rigatoni. It’s a great condiment, too: put a spoonful on fish or chicken hot off the grill for a real treat. Make extra pesto when basil and parsley are plentiful, in summer, and freeze it in small containers to use through the winter.

If you liked the fondues so popular in the 1960s—those pots or chafing dishes of melted cheese in which everyone dunked crudités, crackers, and bread—you will be thrilled to taste an authentic fonduta as it is prepared in Valle d’Aosta. Though the technique of melting cheese over a low flame is much the same, the main ingredient makes all the difference: nothing compares to a fondue of authentic fontina, the sweet, nutty, semi-soft cheese made only in the Aosta Valley—and only from the milk of those gentle dappled red, brown, and black Valdostana cows. Customarily served as a dip for chunks of toasted bread, fonduta is a great sauce for all kinds of foods. I like it on poultry and meats, such as poached chicken or turkey breast, or lightly seared veal medallions; or on vegetables—steamed asparagus, broccoli, cardoons, celery, and many more. And it’s delicious spooned over a bowl of hot polenta or boiled gnocchi. There’s one more thing I must tell you. La sua morte, as it is said in Italian, the ultimate pleasurable enjoyment of fonduta alla Valdostana, is to top it with shavings of fresh white Alba truffle from neighboring Piemonte. Two Italian treasures in one dish.

Gently poach shrimp, then marinate them in the rémoulade for at least 2 hours or overnight to allow the flavors to meld.

Chocolate Espresso Sauce is a flavorful accompaniment to ice cream, fruit, or our favorite Bomboloni.

Clementine Sauce is a flavorful accompaniment to ice cream, fruit, or our favorite Bomboloni.

Whisky Caramel Sauce is a flavorful accompaniment to ice cream, fruit, or our favorite Bomboloni.

This rich dressing spikes through the creamy goodness and answers that "why doesn't my dressing ever taste this good?" question. This recipe works as well with Mini Buffalo Chicken Balls as it does ladled over a thick wedge of iceberg lettuce topped with a few olives, carrot shavings, and crumbled bacon to create a more-than-satisfying classic salad. This dressing will keep up to five days in the fridge.

This pesto if very simple, and its mild, herbaceous flavor makes it the ideal companion for just about any of the meatballs. While many pesto recipes call for pine nuts, we prefer the flavor (and lower price) of walnuts. Try finely chopping them and adding them right at the end for a nice, crunchy texture. We also love this as a healthy party dip, especially because it has no raw garlic—your guests will thank you too! Just cut up some carrots, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, and celery and you're ready to go. You can swap arugula for spinach if you prefer. Pesto freezes well and will keep for up to three months in the freezer.

Since everyone has his or her version of this sauce, we spent a lot of time getting this one right. No surprise, the best results came from using the best ingredients. When it comes to tomato sauce, using poor quality canned tomatoes can leave an acidic or tinny taste in your mouth. So while it is a bit more expensive, we like to use Pomi brand chopped tomatoes (you know, the ones that come in a box). The sauce starts with a careful "sweating" of onions (cooking them slowly, until translucent but not brown, to extract as much flavor as possible), and the flavor continues to build from a nice, long, low-heat simmering after the tomatoes are added.