Getting saucy

Hilts has asked for a tomato sauce recipe, and tomorrow I'll oblige, with instructions on how to transform the fresh fruit into a basic sauce en masse - a comparatively thin sauce that can either be used without further preparation, or used to quickly prepare meat, fish, and vegetable sauces shortly before mealtimes. I'll give you one large theme on which you can make variations, depending on your preferences. But in your experimentation, there are a few rules of thumb to bear in mind:

1. Onion will make a sauce sweet; particularly a sauce from fresh tomatoes, which already tends to be sweeter than sauce from canned tomatoes. My father never makes his sauces with onion for this reason, and I only do sometimes, as I find overly-sweet tomato sauces a bit gross. When I do, I use maybe one small onion for every three kilos of fresh fruit. Don't feel any obligation to include onion if you don't like sweeter sauces. However, if you plan to use the sauce to prepare salt cod, for example, or shellfish, or some other fish with a bit of texture, then consider it seriously; the sweetness brings out the best of the flesh.

2. Spare your herbs. The more delicate they are, the later they should go in; leafy, tender basil, for example, shouldn't go in until after you turn the heat off. Neither should coriander. More papery oregano doesn't need more than two minutes. Tougher sage can go in ten minutes before you turn the heat off. Herbs simply don't need to and shouldn't stew, except rosemary, which either needs to be muslin-bagged so you can take it out and spare your diners rosemary tongue splinters, or else it needs to be pre-fried and then viciously blended in after spending the whole three hours or so cooking with the sauce. Personally, I find rosemary more trouble than it's worth if I'm not making a meat sauce, and even then I'm not a fan. Save it for soups and roasts.

NB, I don't know what the fuck to do with dried herbs because I haven't used them in forevah and they weren't much used for sauce in my family while I was growing up. I'd guess they need a bit of stewing but I'm not sure.

3. Don't over complicate your flavours. In this vein, I advise against using more than one herb in each batch. Two reasons for this: first, when you can or freeze your basic sauce, you don't know exactly what you're going to serve it with, and there is a good chance that you'll need to work on the flavours again at the mealtime. For example, you probably need a stronger sauce for a bland ricotta-stuffed pasta than for a meat-stuffed pasta. Give yourself some leeway here. And second, over-complicated sauces come out with a muddy ditch taste.

4. Fresh-fruit tomato sauce is very acidic, which is the reason the crap you buy off the shelf is half 'stabilizer' or some such. There are a couple of ways to deal with this, most of them applicable when you're preparing the meal and not when you're making the basic sauce. A drop of cream when it comes off the heat for the meal will do. Using the sauce to prepare meat, a fatty whitefish, or the classy-but-broke student's dear friend, canned albacore tuna in olive oil, will also usually cancel out the acidity at the taste level.

In terms of the actual preparation of the sauce, unless it's meat-based (which I will not be telling you how to make, as that might involve blowing some of my daddy's secrets) there isn't much you can do besides ensuring you use enough oil in your pre-fry, ensuring you cook the sauce for the full three or four hours, and using the Famous Italian Secret That Isn't Italian or a Secret: a pinch of cinnamon halfway through the cooking process. Please note, however, that young wives' tales to the contrary, you will taste the cinnamon, unless you're preparing a sweeter sauce, in which case the cinnamon hides behind the onion. Of course, if you plan to use your basic sauce to wet down curried dishes or for eastern Mediterranean/North African dishes, a detectable pinch of cinnamon in the basic sauce is a good idea.

Also please note that in all these cases (long cooking aside), you're simply masking the sauce's acidity. Some of you, or your diners, will get heartburn if you eat too much of it. This is one of the simple inequities of existence and must be tolerated.