Some recipes earn a cult following because they're trendy. Lidia Bastianich's classic marinara, adapted by Julia Moskin for The New York Times, earned one the old-fashioned way: by working, every single time, for the more than 12,000 home cooks who've reviewed it and pushed its average rating to a full five stars.

That number stopped me in my tracks. Twelve thousand reviews isn't a fluke or a viral moment, it's years of people standing over a pot on a Wednesday night, realizing they had everything they needed, and taking the extra thirty seconds to say thank you. In recipe terms you could call it a standing ovation.

I can't walk you through the full ingredient list here, and I'd rather not guess at it, because marinara recipes vary more than you'd think and this one deserves to be read straight from the source. What I will say is that in my experience, the versions of this sauce worth making are refreshingly unglamorous. I've eaten marinara like this all over Italy, usually in someone's kitchen, usually while being scolded for adding too much cheese, and the simplicity has always been the entire point. To me that's the spirit of Bastianich's cooking, few ingredients treated well, which is my read on it and not a quote from her, but it's what I taste every time I cook anything from hers.

What I love about a recipe like this racking up that kind of review count is what it says about where home cooking is right now. People aren't looking for projects. They want the version of a thing they can trust, the one that turns a box of pasta into dinner without a trip to a specialty store. The comment sections on recipes like this are basically a group chat at this point, full of people reporting their own tweaks, some tiny variation involving a pinch of red pepper flakes or a carrot, which is exactly how these recipes have always evolved anyway.

And the people behind it matter too. Bastianich has spent decades teaching American cooks that Italian food isn't fussy, and Moskin's adaptation carries that torch. If you've never made sauce from scratch because it seemed intimidating, this is the kind of recipe that breaks that wall down. If you already make sauce from scratch, you probably have your own version and you're already typing a comment about it. Fair.

My advice, for what it's worth from someone who has eaten a lot of mediocre marinara in a lot of beautiful places: buy the good tomatoes. A sauce with few ingredients leaves nowhere to hide, so every one of them shows up in the final product. You can't mask anything behind cream or sugar or a long ingredient list.

So make it once this week and see why more than 12,000 people bothered to leave a review. Just don't tell me you used jarred garlic. I've been scolded in Italian kitchens before, and I'd hate for it to happen to you too.