There is a pasta sauce with four ingredients, ready in 45 minutes, and with a method so simple even children remember it. It's called "Marcella Hazan's Tomato Sauce". It's been around since 1973. Jennifer Garner just announced it's her favourite pasta. And the internet promptly dragged itself back into a debate that's been running for 50 years: is this a "too-simple" sauce, or a perfect one?

Marcella Hazan (1924-2013) was an Italian cook who in the 1970s moved to New York and, through her book "The Classic Italian Cook Book", taught Americans that Italian food isn't spaghetti bolognese with ketchup. The tomato sauce recipe was in that book. People wrote it off as deceptively simple and ignored it for years. Then social media resurrected it.

What you need:

• 500 ml (or one can) of tinned tomatoes, the rough "pelati" variety with their juice - not fresh
• 75 grams of butter (not olive oil, not margarine)
• 1 onion, peeled and halved (not chopped!)
• salt to taste

Method: put the tomatoes in a deep pan over the lowest heat. Crush them lightly with a fork, not into purée. Add the butter and the halved onion. Cook for exactly 45 minutes over the lowest possible heat, no lid, no over-stirring - two or three stirs over the whole cook is enough. After 45 minutes - take the onion out. (You can eat it as a snack, no one's watching.)

Why does it work? The tomatoes melt into the butter, the onion releases a soft sweetness that dissolves into the sauce without leaving texture, and the low heat lets only the excess water steam off - not the aroma. Hazan called it "the simplest sauce with the cleanest tomato flavour". Garner said: "It makes everyone happy." A Balkan reader will recognise that idea - simple, slow, no flashy ingredients - as the same one their grandmother followed. We just had the luck of inheriting it. Now it gets sold as a "revolutionary recipe" on Instagram.