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I’m a Southern-raised, Brooklyn-based food editor who covers groceries. Growing up around my family’s Thai restaurant sparked my love of food. Before joining The Kitchn team, I held positions at Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, and Allrecipes. I can’t go more than a few hours without a sweet treat.
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Ali Domrongchai
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Supermarket tomato sauce has come a long way. I grew up in a proudly Southern Italian/Sicilian pocket of New York where seemingly everybody’s family had their own passed-down recipe for tomato sauce. Contrary to what the domestic icon Ina Garten says, store-bought was not fine.
Today, ready-to-heat sauces — particularly by restaurants — are all the rage, thanks, in part, to spots like Rao’s and Carbone’s in New York. But decades before the nation went wild over these internet-famous, critically acclaimed sauces, my native suburb was quietly buying up glass jars by another NYC original. I’m talking about Vincent’s Clam Bar, first of Little Italy and now best known as a local gem in nearby Long Island.
Its greatness begins with a colorful back story. According to co-owner of the now-classic Long Island restaurant, Anthony Marisi, the original Vincent’s Clam Bar established in 1904 was “a street cart selling clams, scungilli, mussels, and calamari with mild, medium, and hot [tomato] sauce.”
“That’s all they did!” he says. And boy did they do it exceptionally well. This simple menu was enough to convert the cart into “a little corner space on Mott and Hester Streets;” 10 locations followed, including a small one in Carle Place, NY.
Decades later, Marisi (a server at the time), his brother, and a few fellow servers “begged, borrowed, and stole” to buy the restaurant from the “interesting characters” who owned it. That scrappy wiseguy-turned-gentleman braggadocio (they didn’t have managers and continued to wait tables) is still the core of the business today. It’s widely considered one of the most lauded and beloved Italian restaurants on the island, synonymous with celebration and huge family-style portions, enormous desserts, and LI accents heavier than a loaded lasagna.
Available for sale since the late 1970s, Vincent’s Clam Bar was one of the earliest restaurants to offer customers a jarred taste of its restaurant and, as Marisi puts it, “way ahead of its time.” The mild, medium, and hot tomato sauces are different from its — or any other brand’s — classic marinara and its own chunky (and even more outstanding) tomato basil sauce.
Vincent’s Clam Bar’s signature sauces are more reddish orange than crimson, and because they’re tomato paste-based, have a smokier, sun-dried tomato sweetness to them. They’re smooth, silky, and concentrated — more like a taste bud-coating, satiny tomato gravy, Marisi confirms; the better to cover and cling to seafood, as they were intended to.
You won’t find chunks of tomatoes or visible herbs in the original trio as you will in Vincent’s other, more traditional plum tomato-based sauces. What you will find is a smooth, subtle heat that discreetly comes in at the back of the bite, thanks to a process where red pepper flakes are sauteed in oil and gradually layered in increments.
Because of this, it has its own specific flavor profile and texture that’s gained a loyal following for those in the know.
The most obvious way is to drench mussels, scungilli, clams, and calamari in it, whether individually or all together as a frutti di mare — how Vincent’s originally intended. This can be with or without pasta, which is the second-most obvious way to use this sauce. (I suggest bronze-cut like Barilla’s ultra-textured Al Bronzo Mezzi Rigatoni.) Picky kids love the mild for its sweetness and lack of surprises.
I add it to soups and veggies, and spoon it over frozen pizzas to give them more oomph and up the tomato factor. Because of its consistency, I can also use it to dip mozzarella sticks, garlic bread, pizza rolls, or chicken tenders. It’s also heavenly in an Eggs in Purgatory brunch.
Buy: Vincent’s Medium Tomato Sauce, starting at $4.99 for 16 ounces at LaMonica Fine Foods, plus Uncle Giuseppe’s, North Shore Farms, King Kullen, Stop & Shop, ShopRite and other regional grocers; also available in bulk at Amazon and at Vincent’s Clam Bar
What’s your favorite jarred tomato sauce brand? Tell us in the comments.
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Su-Jit Lin
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Last July I landed in Genoa, Italy, with two friends from Wisconsin for a two-night stay as part of our Italian summer adventure. Before our trip, we’d read about Genovese pesto and vowed to order a dish that features it at nearly every restaurant meal. Typically the pesto is served with trofie pasta, a rod-shaped dried pasta. We also bought jars of this famed pesto at a store one night after dinner, where each jar cost close to 10 euros.
Imagine my shock when I found a jar of this pesto at T.J. Maxx back home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin … for $4. That wasn’t even the clearance price. This was full price for this overstock store more known for bed linens and apparel than its selection of gourmet grocery items (much of which is imported from other countries, including Italy).
As a port city in Italy’s Liguria region, what makes Genoa’s pesto — both the options we enjoyed in Italy and what’s sold in the United States as Genovese pesto — so unique is not just the ingredients you’d otherwise use to make pesto (basil, Parmesan or Pecorino Romano, pine nuts, garlic, and olive oil), but the way it’s prepared. In the U.S., I (and likely other home cooks) prepare pesto in a food processor. In Genoa, you use a mortar and pestle. And the result is lighter on the cheese and heavier on the basil, for a dark-green, smooth pesto.
Another difference is the type of basil. Genovese basil DOP is local to Genoa and a protected designation of origin, much like sparkling wine from Champagne, France. (And, yes, we thought about searching for some of these Genovese basil seeds and either growing it at our friend’s house in the Piedmont region or back home in Wisconsin. According to some gardening experts, you can. But I’m pretty sure the soil between the two continents — and even within Italy, known for its many microclimates — is different. Also, we never found those seeds in Genoa.)
With the pesto bought in Italy, I decided to eat it as “raw” and natural as possible, by spreading on crusty baguettes and crackers until I could lick the jar clean. With the T.J. Maxx jar, I used it as a cooking ingredient instead, stirring it into boiled pasta with the last of our chunky tomato sauce made from tomatoes grown in our backyard, along with sautéed potatoes. It was delicious, with the pesto flavor more in the background. I was also delighted to find that Trader Joe’s recently started carrying trofie pasta. Now whenever I want to be transported back to Italy, I know exactly what to make in my kitchen!
I’m relieved that I no longer have to fly 10 hours across the Atlantic Ocean to score jars of this pesto. Instead, I can add T.J. Maxx to my list of weekend errands and procure it within the hour — provided it’s in stock. One thing about these overstock stores is that the selection changes. But living in a large city as I do, I have a half-dozen T.J. Maxx stores to visit, which is still speedier than flying to Europe.
Find it in stores: Mariangela Prunotto Organic Basil Pesto, $3.99 for 4.5 ounces at T.J. Maxx
What hidden grocery gems are you buying at T.J. Maxx? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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Kristine Hansen
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