It wasn’t until I entered my adult life that I knew more than three kinds of pasta sauces existed: a flash-in-the-pan marinara; a slow-cooked, puréed tomato sauce infused sometimes with ground beef or meatballs; and a much simpler sauce combining olive oil, garlic and red chili pepper flakes. As a half-Italian, my limited repertoire nevertheless exceeded that of my non-Italian friends, whose families debauched their noodles with jarred Ragu or powdered spaghetti sauce from a packet that you mix with water.

Creamy Alfredo and earthy, green pesto sauces seemed revolutionary to me in later years – and I still love them both. Then as restaurants across America began representing more diverse regions of Italy and sometimes modifying those regions’ recipes, I caught onto other winning classics such as meaty Bolognese and oil-based puttanesca made with olives, anchovies and capers (termed oddly in Naples as “whores sauce”).

Yet after poring through The Encyclopedia of Sauces for Your Pasta, by Charles A. Bellissino, I realized that there are enough recipes out there to keep me experimenting for the next 10 years.

The book, now in its sixth revision, contains nearly 500 sauces culled from Italian and American kitchens, raising it to near-biblical status in the culinary world since it was first published in 1991. And as the author proudly points out in the preface, readers are told only once how to boil pasta, as opposed to other sauce-and-pasta tomes that repeat those instructions dozens of times over multiple pages.

Tailored exclusively for pasta, the table of contents covers the gamut for making sauces using almost any existing ingredients that you have sitting in your larder. There are sauces made from butter and/or olive oil, and others dominated by uncooked herbs, cream, meat, veggies, cheese, legumes, liqueurs, brandies, fruit juices and, of course, tomatoes.

In the top margin of each page is a “memory jogger,” which helps readers remember what recipes they’ve tried and how they felt about the results. At the bottom of each recipe are recommended pasta shapes to use – the general rule of thumb being the more pungent the sauce, the plainer or thinner the cut of pasta.

The book’s ease of use rivals all others in my home collection, while listing dozens of sauce recipes that require less time to assemble than it takes to boil the pasta, such as Four Cheese Sauce or Sweet Ricotta Sauce that calls for a smidgen of sugar and cinnamon. Even less traditional are “quickie” onion sauces, a garlic and potato sauce and another made with macadamia nuts, garlic, basil and Parmesan cheese.

For gourmands with time on their hands, the roster includes “long and low” recipes, such as Feast of the Assumption Sauce that requires 12 ingredients – tuna fish, root vegetables, pear tomatoes, eggplant and olives, to name a few. There’s also Lamb and Sweet Pepper Sauce or Ground Veal and Mushroom Sauce that simmers in tomatoes, olive oil and ground allspice for two hours.

The book is available in major bookstores and Internet sites and retails for about $35. It’s worth every penny if you’ve had to eat your bad experiments in the kitchen when the hankering for pasta strikes.