The Complete Book of Pasta Sauces: The Best Italian Pestos, Marinaras, Ragus, and Other Cooked and Fresh Sauces for Every Type of Pasta Imaginable

Turn pasta night from drab to exciting, tired to fresh, with 175 recipes for the best and yummiest pasta sauces imaginable.

Everybody loves pasta—but not if it’s made the same way night after night. Families with kids, especially, eat loads of pasta, but it’s awfully easy to get stuck in a “red-sauce rut,” eating one version or another of marinara sauce over and over again. Enter author Allan Bay, an expat who lives in Rome who has written some of Italy’s best-selling cookbooks. Bay opens up in these pages a big, bold new world of pasta sauces, some from the classic Italian repertoire, other brilliant new creations of his own. They have all sorts of main ingredients, from beef and chicken to shrimp and clams to glorious veggies from artichokes to zucchini. All of the sauces are easy to prepare and every one cooks up fast.

The Complete Book of Pasta Sauces includes:
 

• Asparagus and Pine Nut Sauce
• Meatball Ragout
• Cioppino
• Pesto Sauce, plus six different pesto variations
• Chicken Ragout
• Nantua Sauce with Shrimp
• Lamb Ragout with Porcinis
• Roman Cauliflower Sauce

There are bowls and bowls of kid-friendly sauces and plenty of grownup sauces, too. Each recipe comes with one to three “Best On” recommendations, along with additional “Also Good On” ideas that range from different shapes of standard wheat pasta to egg noodles, polenta, rice, and more. There are suggestions, too, for serving the various sauces directly on meats, poultry, or fish—something that is very common in Italy but less familiar elsewhere.

This deliciously creative book makes pasta and pasta sauces more exciting than they’ve ever been before.

Allan Bay is a tremendously popular and well-respected food historian, cooking teacher, translator, and writer who specializes in the regional and national cuisines of Italy. His series of Italian cookbooks for beginners, Cuochi si Diventa (“You Can Become a Cook”), is a perennial best-seller in Italy and in translated editions around the world. He has written fifteen other highly admired cookbooks. He lives and writes in Rome.