Ragú thinks you should put pasta sauce in everything!

I know that Ragú pasta sauce is often considered a punchline today. (Try typing "why is ragu" into Google and "so bad" is the top suggestion.) However, my hopelessly stained up and damaged There's More to Italian Cooking than Spaghetti (Ragú Foods, undated, but looks like it's probably from the 1970s) suggests that this book was well-loved by its earlier owner.

The cover is one of those pretty wraparound ones, so I scanned the full thing. (Plus, this way you can admire all the water damage.) I am most amused by the tureen with the birds on top, as it makes me imagine birds shitting into the food. That would be one way to make Ragú even less appealing!

The booklet offers some unexpected uses for a sauce that's usually used as a pasta topper. It's the sauce on what I initially thought were little tiny sausage pizzas.

I was kinda right. The crust, sauce, cheese, and sausage all scream pizza, but the title gives away the ingredient that surprised me: Florentine Baked Eggs with Sausage. 

I thought the addition of an egg to the top of what is basically a miniature sausage pizza seemed kind of random-- especially for something that is not being billed as a breakfast pizza-- but this is apparently just a thing I was unaware of. Even after more than a decade of looking at old cookbooks, I keep finding surprises. (At least I was right about one thing. I always expect spinach in recipes labeled "Florentine," and the other recipes I linked to do include it! I guess Ragú thought spinach on pizza was a step too far for their target audience.)

The book also includes a reminder that most non-Italian Americans had no idea what risotto was (other than something involving rice) until relatively recently, so cookbooks could get away with calling pretty much anything a risotto as long as there was some kind of rice somewhere.

Rice cooked as a loaf bound with Ragú Italian Cooking Sauce, eggs, cheese and breadcrumbs, flavored with veggie bits and mustard? Sure. That's risotto-style.

There are also attempts to make American classics, like tuna-noodle casserole, more "Italian" (or Sicilian, in this case). 

I kind of suspected that what amounts to the tuna-noodle casserole that is familiar to Americans who need to feed a crowd quickly and cheaply-- except with Ragú and ricotta substituted for the can of cream-of-something soup-- was not really Sicilian. My Google searches did not turn up anything to dispute this conclusion.

My favorite efforts, though, were those that tried to give Ragú a new spin, like as an ingredient for southwestern cuisine...

...or as the start to a curry.

Maybe it's not that far-fetched. Chili and curry sauce both often start with tomato-based sauces. I can't imagine that the addition of chili powder, kidney beans, shredded chicken, olives, corn, and cheese could make Ragú much worse. (I question pretty much anything with raisins thrown into it, though, so I feel a little less inclined to give the curry a pass, though that is just my personal anti-raisin prejudice speaking.)

In any case, this booklet is an interesting effort to get readers to use way more Ragú, but it also feels a bit like an admission that Ragú is not, in fact, very good. If you just plop it on some spaghetti, you might be pretty disappointed. This anticipated the "Why is Ragú so bad?" search decades ago, and tried to counter by saying, "Dress it up and it will be fine!" And apparently, the earlier owner agreed.