Marcella Hazan’s recipe for spaghetti with fresh basil and tomato sauce was first published in 1973, though it likely originates in nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Italian cooking. Despite or perhaps because of its simplicity, it has been modified many times. As Hazan explains in The Classic Italian Cook Book, there is no single or “original” version of the dish. The laborers who traveled to Rome from the surrounding countryside to sell their wine and produce prepared many different variations: These men were “notoriously underpaid,” Hazan notes, and made use of whatever was available and least expensive, which changed with the seasons. They were known as carrettieri, after the elaborately painted wooden carts they used to transport their goods.
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