In the Market: Battle of the Sauce Stars

Is this the Age of Food? Just look in the supermarket, where no fewer than three celebrities are marketing their own brands of spaghetti sauce. They’re guys you’d recognize in a second too: the Chairman of the Board, the Compassionate Hunk and Big Blue. Not since the mid-’50s, when movie stars by the dozen decided to be Calypso singers, have the famous flocked to a more unlikely second career.

Paul Newman gets the honors for being first in the ring because his Newman’s Own line of “industrial-strength” foods, which also includes a salad dressing and a brand of popcorn, has been around for several years. He takes the altruism event unopposed, because he’s the only one who donates his profits to charitable causes.

And he wins the colorful-prose contest hands down. Sock-It-To-’Em Sockarooni Spaghetti Sauce has not only a title but a subtitle (“Peppers, Spices and the Whole Shebang!”), and the label promises that “all alone, by itself, just sitting there naked, (it) will blow your socks off.” It goes on to claim the recipe was invented in 1833 by Italian bear wrestlers.

Sockarooni turns out to to have an aggressive aroma of tomato and herbs (mostly basil and oregano) that is appealing when the sauce is cold. It would have plenty of uses as a cold sauce--for instance, as a bread spread. When heated, though, it’s clumsy and even somewhat unpleasant, crudely overdosed with oregano, sweetened with corn syrup and almost bitter from the quantity of dried herbs. But it is undeniably industrial-strength. You could taste it through a nylon stocking.

By comparison, Frank Sinatra’s Sugo di Tavola goes heavily for understated class. The label features a classic photo of the Chairman with a mike on the darkest nightclub stage in the world, and the text is modest and dignified. It describes the contents as a simple table sauce, “the sauce you serve your family and share with friends.” A little bit later on, it’s a little more emphatic: “Share this sugo with your friends.”

You wouldn’t want to share it with them on a really special occasion, though. This particular sugo tastes like something whipped up out of what was lying around on the kitchen shelf. Specifically, as the label admits, it was made with “dried minced onions” and “granulated garlic.” The thin, rank, faintly sour smell of the dried ingredients dominates this sauce, which is also the thinnest of the three.

Tommy Lasorda’s Pasta Sauce has the squarest label, just a photo of the Dodger manager (wearing a cap with a blue L on it instead of an LA) floating over an Italian landscape. The label copy is not exactly slick (the words “Remove Cap, Heat and Serve” are followed by “Uses Fresh Homemade Ingredients”), although there are a couple of poetic paragraphs about the Lasorda family tradition that evoke tomatoes simmering all day in Abruzzi, smiles and laughter around the table and so on.

Prominent on the label are the words Original Family Recipe, and of these three sauces, Lasorda’s does have the homiest Italian flavor. In fact, it tastes somewhat like the sauce that was served at Lasorda’s short-lived chain of restaurants. It’s a well-balanced sauce, not as sweet or aggressively herbal as Newman’s and with a better tomato flavor than either of the others, and it also has a welcome aroma of Italian sausage. Strictly as a spaghetti sauce, it’s the winner.

Is this the Age of Food? Obviously. Is it a New Age? Maybe not. This taste test suggests a startlingly old-fashioned stereotype: The best food isn’t cooked by sex symbols. (Sorry, Tommy.)