Great Spaghetti Sauce Cookoff

How do you pick the best of the best from among 300 mouth-watering spaghetti sauce recipes? First, you don’t cook them all, at least not on the stove. You cook them in your head: you go through the steps, imagine how the ingredients would taste together, draw upon every scrap of experience you have with herb combinations and cooking procedures. You go to bed at night after hours of reading recipes with a weird phantom aftertaste of tomato at the back of your tongue. You chop and stir in your dreams.

You group together recipes that are similar, and look for slight advantages of tastiness, or simplicity, or healthfulness (or pure delicious sinfulness). You set aside the ones that don’t give specific amounts, knowing even so that the cooks who submitted those are possibly the best cooks of all. You set aside the ones that start with a canned spaghetti sauce base like Prego or Contadina, even though some of your own best sauces have used just such shortcuts. You try not to get too sentimental over the ones that came from Mama’s Mama, because one can’t buy the secret ingredients of love and tradition at the store.

Finally, you just quit agonizing and make choices. Life, and spaghetti sauce contests, are not fair.

RECIPES

Herbed Tomato Spaghetti Sauce 
Sauce with Meatballs and Italian Sausage 
Hearty-Y Tomato Sauce 
Spaghetti Sauce Puttanesca 
Throw-The-Diet-Out-The-Window Sauce 
Calcutta Pasta Sauce 
Tomato Sauce with Orange and Basil 
Angela's Squid Spaghetti 
Baked Tomato Sauce 
Heat Wave Spaghetti Sauce 
Family Recipe
Evergreen Spaghetti 
Roasted Tomato Sauce with Sun-Dried Tomatoes 
Summer Spaghetti with Gazpacho Sauce