All the Best Pasta Sauces

T. Arleigh Crawford was a graduate student living in Potsdam, New York.

If you thought you didn’t have time to make dinner tonight, think again. Here are about 60 recipes “to cook while the pasta boils.” In fact, some of the recipes require no cooking at all, but depend on the heat in the noodles to gently coax the flavour out.

The emphasis is on simplicity, both for the sake of time and as an aesthetic norm. A few distinctively flavoured ingredients are quickly combined only long enough to bring out the flavours but so that each retains its identity.

The recipes presented here will serve variously as first courses, to accompany an entree, or as entrees themselves. Some, like Creamy Sun-Dried Tomato Sauce, call for more exotic ingredients and provide a simple and unintimidating opportunity to sample them. Others — Pecan Tomato Sauce is one — combine familiar ingredients in interesting ways.

Each recipe is preceded by a short descriptive note and a particular type of pasta is recommended for each sauce. The recipes are generally for four servings but they are amenable to expanding or dividing as appetite and numbers demand.