The Old-Fashioned Foods Susan Sarandon Still Has on Her Plate

Plenty of actors reach for whatever the latest wellness trend recommends, rotating through ingredients as fast as the headlines change. Susan Sarandon’s actual go-to dish has stayed put for decades, untouched by any of that.

It traces back to a much earlier chapter of her life, long before green powders and supplement routines were part of the conversation at all.

A Homemade Sauce She Invented While Living in Rome

Sarandon has described a pasta sauce she still makes as something she came up with decades ago, during a stretch of “one of my go-to pastas when I was living in Rome.” The dish itself is about as unfussy as Italian cooking gets: sautéed onions and garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, and fresh goat cheese broken up so it melts straight into the sauce.

There’s no elaborate technique involved, and that’s clearly part of the appeal. A sauce built from pantry staples and one soft cheese has none of the precision a modern recipe card usually demands, which is likely why it’s held up for so long without needing an update.

She Never Needed a Recipe to Make It Her Own

Because she invented the sauce herself rather than following someone else’s method, Sarandon has said nobody was in a position to tell her she was doing it wrong. That kind of ownership over a dish is a distinctly old-fashioned way of cooking, closer to how a recipe gets passed down through memory and instinct than how one gets written up and standardized today.

That looseness also explains why the dish has been so easy to keep making for years without it ever feeling like a chore. A recipe with no strict rules attached doesn’t require any particular ingredient to be exactly right, which removes most of the friction that causes a dish to eventually fall out of rotation.

Her Daughter Remembers a Far Stricter Kitchen Growing Up

The image of Sarandon happily eating a simple, from-scratch pasta sits in contrast to how her daughter has described the household’s food rules growing up. Actress Eva Amurri has said “my mom was a tried and true ‘almond mom,'” recalling trips to organic grocery stores and skepticism toward ordinary packaged cereal.

That contrast is worth sitting with, since it suggests Sarandon’s old-fashioned habits were never really about nostalgia for a specific era of American food. The pasta sauce survived because it was simple and homemade, not because it reminded her of a childhood box of cereal.

The Recipe Has Quietly Become a Two-Generation Dish

What started as Sarandon’s own improvised pasta has since been handed down rather than left behind, with Eva taking over the technique and, according to her mother, now dictating how it should be done. That handoff turns a single dish into something closer to a family recipe than a personal habit.

That kind of passing down is exactly how old-fashioned cooking has always worked, long before recipes were something people looked up rather than learned from someone else at the stove. A dish that outlives the person who invented it, adopted and adjusted by the next generation, is about as traditional as food gets.

Simplicity Has Aged Better Than Any Specific Ingredient

None of this suggests Sarandon has resisted every modern habit around food, since plenty of her other choices lean toward more current wellness thinking. What’s stuck around instead is a general preference for something simple, homemade, and not overly engineered.

That distinction matters more than any single ingredient on the plate. The pasta sauce isn’t on her table today because it’s old-fashioned for its own sake, it’s there because a dish built on a handful of honest ingredients rarely needs replacing.