What are the most traditional Italian pasta sauces?

Cafe Society
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I will start by sharing with you a few very pretty examples of potentially sketchy advertising. In the 90s, there was a series of ads for a pasta sauce called Classico. It showed beautiful, sunlight-filled scenes from the Italian countryside, and the sauces were claimed to be examples of regional Italian variants of pasta sauce. See here, here, and here.

Back in the day, I saw the first one of the commercials linked. It left me with the impression that all over Italy, there were specific traditional regional variations on the basic red spaghetti sauce - and that buying this product would bring that wonderful variety to your table. However, since then, I have realized that there don’t seem to be any “Di Parma” or “Di Salerno” regional pasta sauces (in fact, that classic tomato-based sauce seems to be more of a Southern Italian thing, correct me if I’m wrong.) At any rate, I haven’t found many examples of regional variations on basic tomato sauce. Here is a list of supposedly regional sauces, and many are not based on tomato. Moreover, if you look at the second commercial I linked above, they include “customer testimonials” which I find difficult to believe (three people claiming that a sauce in a jar from the supermarket is as good as or better than their Italian mother’s homemade sauce). And the third commercial claims that the sauce featured therein is inspired by Italian cuisine, while repeating the company line at the end to the effect that what they sell is authentic Italian recipes.

OK, so what are some examples of authentic, traditional Italian pasta sauces besides the basic tomato sauce (that’s called Marinara, right? Tomato, onion, herbs, optional garlic)? The origins of some sauces are modern: Arrabiata - about the same but with garlic and chilli pepper-, which is an invention of modern Roman cuisine from the 50s/60s, according to Wikipedia, and Alfredo sauce an early 20th-century recipe from Alfredo Di Lelio, a Roman restaurateur. Or there’s the dish Penne alla vodka, with a rose sauce including vodka, which seems to be a recent invention. A Penne dish with vodka is first mentioned in a 1974 cookbook published by the actor Ugo Tognazzi.

So what about, for example, Amatriciana sauce (mainly tomato sauce, Pecorino cheese, and bits of cured hog jowl)? Is that “traditional”? Or what about “Fra Diavolo” (not so different from Arrabiata - made of tomato sauce, sauteed onions, crushed red pepper, and garlic). Is that a venerable old recipe?

What other regional variations that are old and authentic, and not known to come from modern chefs are there for pasta sauce? Do any of them concern variations on basic tomato-based sauce, like the apparently region-inspired ones in the advertisements for the Classico line of sauces shown above? Also, do people cooking spaghetti in Italy at home tend to be conservative, or do they ever experiment, producing results akin to the commercially available sauce I have shown here? Is it common for one person’s Nonna to like adding mushrooms to Marinara sauce, for another to favor adding grated cheese, another capers and olives, another roasted bell pepper, and so on, or do Italians generally keep it simple when making pasta at home?

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[Moderating]
Moving to Cafe Society.

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The ones I usually see are:

1. Gricia. Guanciale, Pecorino Romano, black pepper, onion (optional). This is the base for the secondary sauce, Amatriciana.

2. Cacio e Pepe. Pecorino Romano cheese, pasta water and black pepper.

3. Burro e Parmigiano. Butter, Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. This is the original Alfredo without the cream.

4. Carbonara. Egg, Pecorino Romano, onion (optional), guanciale (or pancetta), and black pepper.

5. Aglio Olio e Peperoncino. Extra virgin olive oil, parsley, garlic and peperoncino (dry, red chili flakes). This is pronounced in Roman dialect as almost one word “ aio e oio.” It is a late night staple of many midnight spaghettatas and is considered to be originally from Naples but is often prepared in Roma as well, so I “borrowed” and “adopted”. SOURCE

Notably that misses a Bolognese which should probably be included but the OP said not to include that.

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In Dalmatia [not Italy but on other side of the Adriatic and within their broader sphere of influence except for a brief bit of Ottoman rule] there are traditional recipes which do not even use tomatoes and potentially predate the Columbian exchange. One dish is pasticada, which is more of a spiced beef ragout. The meat with sauce is the main dish and usually dolloped over pasta.

Its arguably traceable back to Roman times at least, which would make the saucy meat the original part and then pasta came in with or before Marco Polo [depending on who you believe], and then eventually a bloke with a tomato came into view. Not sure how dairy-based sauces work in that chronology.

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I actually didn’t mention Bolognese anywhere.

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OK, so what are some examples of authentic, traditional Italian pasta sauces besides the basic tomato sauce

You said that was marinara but I would think a Bolognese would fit too.

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Traditional ragu Bolognese is a meat sauce slow simmered in a soffrito of onions, celery, and carrots. There is a tomato element, but it’s not the primary or even secondary part of the sauce. It most certainly is not a “basic tomato sauce.”

Now, granted, in parts of the world that aren’t Bologna, this name is frequently given to sauces that are much more tomato-based to the exclusion of its traditional ingredients, but this thread is about traditional sauces not their bastardized foreign versions.

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I’m not an expert on ‘authentic, traditional’ Italian sauces, but exactly what ‘traditional’ is can be hard to pin down. How old does it have to be to be considered ‘traditional’? Tomatoes weren’t even introduced to Italy until the 15th or 16 century.

How about good old-fashioned spaghetti and meatballs? No, meatballs are an American invention to satisfy Americans’ higher consumption of meat. Pasta as a main course is also more of an American thing than an Italian thing- in Italy I believe pasta is more often served as a smallish portion in a beginning course of the meal, not the main.

Not pasta sauce, but related-- American servicemen in Italy during WWII brought their love of pizza back to the states, where it changed a lot from the simpler version usually served in Italy. Then later, American tourists visiting Italy were disappointed that the pizza they found there didn’t have a million toppings and such, and some Italian pizza places resorted to modifying their pizza to be more American-style.

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I’m not sure that is true. My great-grandparents came to America in the early 1900s with their children, my grandparents. Spaghetti and meatballs was a very traditional meal for our family. My great-grandma didn’t speak English, nor could she read or write (in either language). I remember my Grandma telling me that she was the only little girl in school that didn’t get anything from Santa. A neighbor had to explain to my great-grandma the American tradition of Santa Claus. So I don’t think she would have been too trendy in her cooking. In fact, spaghetti and meatballs was her and my grandma’s most cooked meal. We never ate any white sauce or any other red sauce.

But I suppose I could be wrong and they never saw a meatball until they came to America :woman_shrugging:

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Here’s what Wikipedia has to say (no need to click the link; the payoff is in the caption below). So it’s at least a bit of a gray area. It’s possible, as with my pizza story, that ‘modern’ style spaghetti and meatballs made its way from the US back to Italy and then became ‘traditional’ to your great-grandparents there. The point I was trying to make in my post is that food styles and trends are often evolving as they bounce around through cultures. It’s not always easy to pin down exactly what is ‘traditional’.

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No, they certainly saw a meatball (polpette) before they came to the US. What may have changed with the move to the US was 1) that the meatballs were served with spaghetti or some other pasta and 2) that pasta and meatballs were considered a meal, rather than simply one course of a meal.

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The idea of “traditional” is usually quite overblown. People love their traditions, because they associate them with their own lives and loved ones. However, tradition is almost never as deep as people act like it is.

A lot of things we think of as “traditional” food are often only one or two or three generations old. And certainly only a teeny tiny fraction of traditions go back beyond the Columbian Exchange.

Specifically, with respect to Italians, they seem to have very definite ideas about traditions that don’t really hold up under intense scholarly scrutiny.

The classic Italian attitude is to make a declarative sentence like “X never uses Y” but then when you look into it, there is a plethora of exceptions.

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This could well be the case. I’ve spent a lot of time in Puglia, where the cuisine is relatively untouched by the rest of Italy, never mind America, and they do eat meatballs - they just tend to be served as antipasti (no sauce). I can’t recall ever seeing meatballs with pasta anywhere in Italy, that’s not to say it doesn’t exist somewhere of course.

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From what I’ve read, Carbonara is a mid-20th century invention as well- probably a mutation of pasta alla gricia that uses eggs and bacon instead of guanciale.

I might be wrong, but I’d imagine pesto (the basil & pine nuts kind) is probably pretty ancient stuff, with similar sauces/dishes (moretum) mentioned in Roman cuisine.

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My relatives in Calabria certainly cooked with meatballs: I remember having this Pasta al forno con polpettine - economica facile e veloce. I don’t know how “traditional” it is, but it was certainly made in an Italian home by Italian people without any feeling that it was remarkable or exotic.

The only think I’d say is that while I’ve seen many a meatball and also meatloaf, I don’t think I’ve every seen the giant Italian-American meatballs in Italy. Theirs are always a good deal smaller, in my experience, and I don’t think anyone in my family ever made meatballs larger than maybe an inch in diameter. I always perceive anything larger as inauthentic, though I really like them.

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I had the same thought. I’d imagine that most tomato based sauces wouldn’t be in the running for most traditional Italian pasta sauces since they only started to come around to Italy around 1700.

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What about putanesca? I’d imagine it’s been around awhile, if it’s been around as long as its eaters!

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I was wondering the same thing. That’s one of the very first sauces that comes to my mind when I think of Italian cuisine.

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I don’t think it’s quite as old as the world’s oldest profession :slightly_smiling_face:

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Basically I’d think almost any non-tomato, non-pepper type Italian sauce is probably pretty old. Things like cacio e pepe, pesto, gricia, brown butter & sage, etc… all use ingredients that are if not native, easily transported long distances, like pepper.

This means that something like Puttanesca is probably fairly recent in historical terms- at least after whenever chiles became popular in Italy- probably in the 17th century at the earliest, I’d guess. Same thing for anything with tomatoes or squash.

But I’d say the odds on winner for oldest still extant sauce might be colatura di alici, which is a Calabrian fish sauce that seems to be a direct modern-day descendant of ancient Rome’s Garum, which was a fish sauce similar to Vietnamese nuoc mam or Thai nam pla (what we just call ‘fish sauce’ these days).