Ragù alla bolognese

A ragù is not a tomato sauce with meat in it. It is meat, cooked slowly in fat and a little liquid, with tomato present as seasoning rather than as the body of the sauce. Get that proportion right and the rest is patience.

It is also not served with spaghetti in Bologna, and never has been. Tagliatelle, or a short tube that traps sauce. The pairing with thin round pasta is a twentieth-century export.

Ingredients

Serves 4 to 6, and it is not worth making less.

	Metric	Imperial
Beef chuck or skirt, minced coarsely	400 g	14 oz
Pancetta, chopped fine	100 g	3.5 oz
Onion, carrot, celery, all diced small	80 g each	3 oz each
Tomato paste	2 tbsp	2 tbsp
Dry white wine	150 ml	5 fl oz
Whole milk	250 ml	8 fl oz
Meat stock or water	300 ml	10 fl oz
Butter	30 g	1 oz

Coarse mince matters more than the cut. Meat ground to a paste turns grainy over three hours; meat in recognisable pieces stays tender.

Method

1. Melt the butter and render the pancetta gently until the fat runs clear.
2. Add the onion, carrot and celery and cook slowly until they collapse and turn sweet, 15 to 20 minutes. Do not brown them. This is the step people rush, and it is the one that decides the flavour.
3. Raise the heat, add the beef, and cook until it has lost its raw colour and begun to catch on the pan.
4. Pour in the wine and let it evaporate completely.
5. Stir in the tomato paste, then the milk. Let the milk be absorbed almost entirely before adding any stock.
6. Add stock to barely cover, bring to a bare simmer, and leave it uncovered for at least three hours. Top up with a little water if it threatens to catch.
7. It is done when the fat has separated and sits glossy on the surface, and the sauce is dark brown rather than red.

What goes wrong

It stays bright orange and loose. Too much tomato, not enough time. Tomato paste is a seasoning here, and the colour should darken as the hours pass.

It tastes thin and sharp. The soffritto was rushed. Twenty minutes of slow cooking is not the same as five minutes of frying, and nothing later replaces it.

It turns grainy. Either the mince was too fine, or it boiled rather than simmered. A ragù should barely move.

Why it works

The milk is the part that looks wrong and is not. Its proteins bind to the meat and soften it, and its sugars brown slowly over the long cook, which is where the sweetness and the dark colour come from. Adding it before the stock, and letting it go almost dry, is the difference between a sauce that tastes long and one that tastes merely reduced.

At the table

In Bologna this goes on tagliatelle, and the width of the ribbon is a matter of local pride rather than preference. It also goes into lasagne, into tortellini broth as a memory of itself, and almost nowhere else.

It does not go on spaghetti. The sauce is heavy and the strands are round, so it slides off and pools at the bottom of the bowl. Ordering spaghetti bolognese in Emilia is the single most efficient way of announcing where you are from, and outside Italy it is a different dish that borrowed the name.

It is a primo, and a substantial one, so what follows it is usually small.

The cheese is parmigiano reggiano and it goes on at the table, generously. The wine is Lambrusco, which surprises visitors who expect something serious: it is lightly sparkling, it is red, it is cold, and it cuts through the fat exactly as intended. A Sangiovese does the same job with less argument.

Sunday is when it appears, and a pan of it is made for the week.

What an Italian would say

That it goes on tagliatelle and not on spaghetti. That the tomato is there for acidity and colour rather than for volume. And, in Bologna, that the version lodged with the Chamber of Commerce in 1982 is a reference point rather than a rule, which is a very Bolognese thing to say about a document one is also proud of.