Name: Penne with tomato and basil
Yield: Feeds four
Ingredients: 500 g (1 lb) penne; 1 tsp sugar; 1 bunch basil; 2 garlic cloves, lightly smashed; ½ tsp sea salt; 6 tbsp olive oil; 1 kg (2 lb) ripe, red tomatoes

Preparation info

Feeds
four

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Old Food

By Jill Dupleix

Published 1998

About

I wish I had invented this. It’s quite simply the best pasta sauce in the world. It’s not one of the oldest, because tomatoes didn’t hit Italy until the end of the sixteenth century, but they certainly made up for lost time, Even miserable out-of-season tomatoes are improved with this treatment, so summer’s best become truly heavenly.

Ingredients

1 kg (2 lb) ripe, red tomatoes
6 tbsp

Method

Dunk tomatoes in a pot of boiling water for 15 seconds, remove and peel off skin. Cut in half and squeeze out seeds. Chop remaining tomato flesh roughly.

Gently heat olive oil, tomatoes, garlic, salt and sugar and half the basil leaves and cook gently until soft, around 30 minutes.

Cook pasta in plenty of simmering, salted water until tender, but still firm to the bite. Drain we