Rachel Roddy’s recipe for tomato and sausage ragu | A kitchen in Rome

How the tomato sauce that defined a nation came to be, plus a variation on the theme that’s perfect for making in a big batch

While a pan burps and occasionally spits from the back of the stove, a story. The first description of tomato sauce arrived in Italy in 1628. It was from Mexico, of course, by way of Spain and the pen of naturalist and physician to Philip II, Francisco Hernández, whose detailed documentation of plants and Mexican food customs filled 16 volumes. Translated first into Latin, then Italian, one of the volumes includes a description of an intinctus (dip or sauce) “prepared from sliced tomatoes and chilli pepper, which enriches the flavour of almost all dishes, and reawakens the appetite”.

Not that anyone was eating tomatoes in Italy yet. They’d arrived several decades earlier, in the form of a few plants and seeds, again from Mexico, where they grew wild and were revered. In his recent and detailed investigation into spaghetti with tomato sauce, the Italian food historian Massimo Montanari notes that tomatoes were treated with curiosity and deep suspicion; they could be eaten, but physicians of the time warned they might cause “torment to your eyes and head”.