The Controversial Ingredient Audrey Hepburn Used In Her Pasta Sauce

In the 1954 movie "Sabrina," Audrey Hepburn played the titular character who goes to Paris to study cooking at Le Cordon Bleu. In real life, Hepburn was a bit of an accomplished home cook, and her favorite meal was a simple Italian classic — spaghetti al pomodoro. When she wasn't in the mood to make a big dinner, however, Hepburn was known to use a controversial ingredient to make an easy weeknight pasta sauce: ketchup. 

Now, before you panic at the thought of making pasta sauce with ketchup, you should know that Hepburn wasn't simply dumping a bottle of ketchup into a pot with pasta and calling it tomato sauce. Instead, according to her other son Luca, she made a very specific (and honestly quite elegant) one-pot dish of penne pasta with a dollop of ketchup, Emmentaler cheese, olive oil, and butter. There was also a bit of a technique to making the dish commonly used for making risotto called mantecare.

Ketchup gets a bit of a bad rap when it comes to cooking, probably because it's associated with people who squirt it all over french fries (which is one of the most controversial food debates of our generation). If you want to agitate a chef, ask for a side of ketchup with an expensive steak at a fancy restaurant. Ketchup as an ingredient, however, is pretty standard. In fact, you can't make cocktail sauce for shrimp without ketchup, and it's a crucial component in many barbecue sauce recipes. It's got an umami-rich cooked tomato flavor that would take you all afternoon to replicate on the stove with fresh tomatoes, and when used properly, you can harness that rich tomato flavor to make a delicate sauce like Audrey Hepburn's. 

In his book "Audrey at Home: Memories of My Mother's Kitchen," Audrey Hepburn's son Luca Dotti shared her recipe for penne with ketchup. "It sounds terrible, but actually it's pretty good!" Dotti told The Associated Press. "We ate it when it was just the two of us, in front of the TV."

All she did to make this was reserve about a ¼ cup of the pasta water (a move that is currently having a moment). She would then mix in butter, olive oil, and Heinz ketchup.

If you want to make penne with ketchup just like Audrey Hepburn, there's one twist when mixing the ingredients. Her recipe uses an Italian technique known as mantecare. The word doesn't directly translate into English, but the gist of it is to add fresh, cold butter, cream, or olive oil to the dish just before it's finished to get an extra creamy texture.

In Hepburn's dish, mantecare comes into play by letting the pasta sit in the pot for about two minutes after mixing in the butter and olive oil with a splash of the reserved pasta water. Make sure that the butter is cold, and it helps if the olive oil is also chilled. This lets the cooked starch from the pasta, butter, and oil meld together before adding a squirt of ketchup to finish the sauce. There is so little ketchup that the sauce should look light pink and have only a very light tomato taste. Finally, right before it hits the table, the whole dish is topped with a little grated Emmentaler. So, while it might sound a little funky if you think of ketchup as an ingredient instead of a condiment, you can make a dish as elegant as "Breakfast at Tiffany's" any night of the week.