The first thing to know about marinara: it’s not a synonym for tomato sauce.

“Marinara is very specific,” says Oretta Zanini de Vita, who has just published a very specific cookbook on how to pair pasta shapes with pasta sauces. “Tomato sauce is a completely different thing.”

“It’s all about quick, and light, and feeling the tomatoes in your mouth,” said Lidia Bastianich, who recently published her 12th book on the food of Italy, “Lidia’s Commonsense Italian Cooking” (Knopf).

Real marinara sauce has the taste and juice of fresh tomato, but also a velvety texture and the rich bite of olive oil: even the best jarred sauces can’t pull that off. And because it comes together from pantry ingredients before the pasta water even comes to a boil, it’s a recipe that home cooks should master.

The trick to perfect marinara is to cook it at a vigorous simmer, so that the tomatoes are cooked through just as the sauce becomes thick. The tomato pieces hold their shape, the seeds don’t have time to turn bitter, and the color stays bright red. Done right, it explains why spaghetti with tomato sauce is a dish that a person might crave virtually every day, as fundamental as bread and butter or rice and kimchi.