Finally, a tournament that levels the wide world of pasta sauce.

There's lots of talk about how the fall of the World Trade Center has made us hungry for shared meals and comfort food. I'm very happy to hear it: The fact that food can help heal us is something I strongly believe in (not to mention something I make my living encouraging).

Unfortunately, when the crisis occurred and for several days after, I was unable to eat. It was during this starved desperation that I did something heretofore inconceivable in my adult life: I bought jarred tomato sauce. I always make my own marinara. But when I hadn't consumed food in three days, I didn't have the damn energy. At this delusional moment I pondered the state of store-bought tomato sauce. There are so many brands, flavors, and even celebrities clogging the market nowadays.

As I stood in the valley of the jars, mind reeling, I felt a slight surge of hunger rumble in my belly. I decided I would do a taste test—the biggest, most exacting taste test I could devise, based on the "March Madness" NCAA college basketball scoring system—to determine whether or not any of the products out there were actually tasty. Lo, I had a reason to eat again.

A Note on Marinara The variations on "marinara" sauce are many, including with basil and without, with garlic and without, with chunks of tomatoes and smooth, with oregano and without—"real" marinara sauce is somewhat hard to define. In The Italian-American Cookbook, John Mariani calls marinara sauce "the defining element of Italian-American cookery." His version contains oregano and garlic and a half-teaspoon of sugar. Mario Batali's "basic tomato sauce" recipe in Simple Italian Food contains onion, a shredded carrot, and thyme.

Despite the wide range of acceptable ingredients, I had to draw the line: nothing with added sun-dried tomatoes, pesto, or sun-dried tomato pesto. Not that these things aren't delicious, I simply object to the way they've become so trendy. Perfectly plain marinara sauces would be the poison.

The Selection Process
The world of tomato sauce is populated by the haves and the have-nots: Some sauces are made and marketed by famous people or well-known restaurants and some aren't. I opted for six of these fancy brands and for six "regular" brands from non-boldfaced names.

Celeb makers include Emeril Lagasse, arguably the most famous chef in America; Lidia Bastianich, a restaurateur and part-time television chef and cookbook author; Paul Newman, who needs no explanation; Patsy's, a restaurant Sinatra used to frequent in New York City that's been open since 1944; Rao's, another family-owned restaurant in New York, this one more than 100 years old with a notoriously vexing no-reservations policy; and Coco Pazzo, a national mini-chain of upscale trattorias.

The Methodology
The taste test was double blind: The judges did not know whether they were tasting a celeb or a scrub sauce, and they did not know the brands of the sauces. Two rounds of inter-team competition produced one winner from each team; the two winners then competed against each other in the finals.

Because I have the good fortune of being married to someone who produces sophisticated accounting spreadsheets for a living, I let my husband organize the heats. Here's what he did: First, he divided the sauces into their two respective teams, celebs and scrubs. Then, he poured the contents of each jar into 12 identical red plastic cups. He next assigned a letter to each sauce and wrote the letter on the bottom of each cup. Within each group, he arranged the cups in random order. Finally, he wrote numbers on the face of each cup.