What sauce do you put on your pasta?
Are you asking seriously?
Because I do have extremely serious thoughts about pasta and sauce.
Half seriously, but with a sizeable mockery component. In my younger days I was obsessed with capellini/angel hair pasta, but it required precise timing and prompt plating to avoid having a big, stuck together mass. It performed slightly better with oily cream sauces, but Mrs. Duck and I gave up that particular study when we began collecting and feeding children. Somehow watching your own toddlers bathe in the unholy gruel that is Kraft Mac & Cheese sauce kind of dulled the luster of special pasta night.
Today it's a simple red sauce on linguine with - arguably - some of the best Calabrian pepper salsicca sausage in the country: Fiama from Salume Beddu up in the city. A big can of whole imported San Marzano tomatoes, a half clove of shaved garlic and a small shallot minced and sauted together for 3 or 4 minutes, herbs to taste, a dash of salt and pepper and a splash of olive oil - all slowly cooked down for 3-4 hours. Cut the sausage into 2-1/2 in lengths, brown and drain and add to the sauce an hour before serving. I buy the linguine from an Italian grocer. Think it's imported, but markings aren't clear. Have attempted making pasta a time or two, but alas I have no Italian genes or relatives, so...
There's a large Italian enclave in the city with lots of restaurants, a couple grocers and a gelataria. We occasionally go to Cunetto's House of Pasta there, and I usually hare their Pasta Tutto Mare - creamy-cheesy seafood sauce. Takes a week to burn off the cholesterol from that meal. Been looking for some ground veal to up my meatball game, but I don't think that shit is available any more here.
Mrs. Duck bought some Italian alphabet pasta and circle pasta and makes homemade Spaghettios for our granddaughters. Spoiler: they prefer the canned shit. We laugh! So what's the sauce on your sauce - do cheesesteak niggers prefer red or white?
Today it's a simple red sauce on linguine with - arguably - some of the best Calabrian pepper salsicca sausage in the country: Fiama from Salume Beddu up in the city.
I deeply miss the sausage monger of my childhood, Sonny D'Angelo. I have no idea whether he is still alive, but the dude made the best sausages I've ever had, his wild boar and ligonberry sausage was fucking fantastic.
He was also a notably pissed off and ornery individual, the sort of person that got pissed off if he had customers. If you ever tried to pay with card, he would go into a tirade about how much the processing companies take in merchant fees. In retrospect, he extremely based.
Regardless, he made by far and away the best sausage in Philly.
I once saw Marc Vetri in his shop, and Marc Vetri is a man who is generally considered to be the best of the serious Philadelphia Chef/Restaurateurs, like, he is kind of a big deal, and Sonny D'Angelo is just tearing into the guy as he buys his sausage, once again, over credit card processing fees. And I am not sure if Sonny D'Angelo doesn't know who he is talking to, or whether he simply doesn't give a fuck.
Regardless, Vetri takes the verbal abuse with a sheepish smile. The sausage was just that good.
Unfortunately, Sonny shutdown maybe 10 years ago. Dude was a shit businessman, obviously.
But he was the singular greatest sausage-monger I have ever seen.
I wouldn't exactly call it a sauce, but my favorite method of preparing most shapes of pasta (with the exceptions of long cylindrical shapes, like spaghetti), is mostly to boil the pasta for two-three minutes less than the packaging suggests, before removing the pasta from the boiling water, and rinsing it well under cold water, before putting it into a pan, along with a good nob of the most expensive butter you can buy, cracking fresh pepper over it, and salting it to taste. A touch or the retained starchy water you boiled the past in helps to bring it all together.
I really think high quality butter with salt and pepper outshines most pasta sauces, unless you have an Italian Grandmother who is will to spend eight hours simmering a Sunday marinara.