Taste: My Life through Food(15)

My suggestion to anyone who eats pasta either with or without gluten is, please pair it with the appropriate sauce and vice versa, because you never know who might be watching. Here are a few wonderful and, for me, acceptable combinations of paste and salse.

Spaghetti: Salsa pomodoro con tonno, carbonara, vongole

Rigatoni: Beef-based ragù, all’Amatriciana

Ditali: Salsa pomodoro con piselli, salsa pomodoro con cozze



To bring greater clarity to this subject of pairing appropriately, or to simply obsess a little more about the mating of sauce and pasta, I would like to share some thoughts on “ragù.”





Ragù: What, Why, How?


In French cuisine a stew made of vegetables, tomato, and sometimes meat is known as ragout. By all accounts it was the French who brought ragout to Italy, hence the Italianized word “ragù.” According to the writer Massimo Lanari, ragù was only served as a main dish and not actually used on pasta until the 1800s. It was only then that it became a sauce that always contains some kind of meat and was paired with specific shapes of either fresh or dried pasta.

In England, before chefs like Ruth Rogers, Antonio Carluccio, Gennaro Contaldo, and Contaldo’s protégé Jamie Oliver introduced the Brits to the depths of the Italian kitchen, spaghetti Bolognese, or “spag bol,” as they call it, was basically the only Italian food besides pizza that was eaten throughout their green and pleasant land. But in Italy you will be hard-pressed to find such a thing as spaghetti Bolognese. This is ironic because the pairing of the spaghetti from the southern kingdom of Naples and ragù alla Bolognese from the north was created as a culinary symbol of unification after Garibaldi united Italy in 1861. However, today, were that original pairing ever to transpire on any part of the peninsula, especially in Bologna, the cook would be outcast, and possibly be-handed. Today, ragù alla Bolognese is traditionally eaten (“traditionally eaten” in Italy means that if you eat it any other way, you will probably end up on a watch list) with fresh pasta like tagliatelle or maybe, maybe fettucine. (Although in Naples, paccheri is acceptable, I am told.) The reason for this is that the richness of the sauce needs a pasta of suitable shape and texture to absorb it properly. Dried spaghetti does not hold ragù alla Bolognese in this way and is therefore frowned upon as an appropriate pairing. I have spoken to the great chef and altruist Massimo Bottura about this. He takes this pairing as a personal and cultural affront. Having tried both versions, I happen to agree. I have also eaten Massimo’s hand-chopped silky ragù alla Bolognese with his handmade pasta and it defies description. (Yes, I will shamelessly continue to brag like this throughout the book.)

Regarding the sauce itself, it is important to know that the Bolognese don’t call their meat sauce Bolognese sauce. They call it simply ragù. Outside of Bologna it will be known as Bolognese or alla Bolognese to differentiate it from other meat-based tomato sauces. And there are countless variations: with or without tomato; only minced veal; only minced beef; a combination of minced pork, beef, and veal; a glug of cream; and so on.

However, having spoken to historians and cooked with a chef at the Artusi Museum in Emilia-Romagna, I can say that the truest ragù alla Bolognese recipe is in the brilliant cookbook Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. This unique tome, published in 1891, was the work of Pellegrino Artusi, a seventy-one-year-old retired businessman who was the first person ever to assemble hundreds of recipes from every region of Italy and put them into a single cookbook. Originally containing 450 recipes, it now contains over 700 and is like a second Bible in the home of most Italians.

Artusi’s recipe is a mixture of salted pork, ground veal, carrots, onions, celery, stock, salt, butter, nutmeg, and a pinch of flour; has no tomato at all; and is cooked in about ten minutes. It was originally suggested that it be served with denti di cavallo (horse teeth) pasta, which I had never heard of and sounds very unappetizing, but today it is primarily served with fresh tagliatelle. Artusi’s method is purported to be the most authentic way of preparing this now-world-famous sauce and the basis of the countless varieties we eat today.

Other ragù use no ground meat but are simply slow-cooked meat-based sauces. Many Italian Americans call a meat-based ragù by the incredibly vague name of “red sauce” or even “gravy.” (Gravy to me is what you pour over turkey on Thanksgiving Day.) How those words came to be used I do not know, but their lack of specificity points to the homogenization of Italian cooking by Americans and second-and third-generation Italian Americans themselves. In my household, almost every sauce had a different name, as they were each completely different sauces. On any given day we would eat salsa Maria Rosa, marinara, tomato sauce with peas, or a light tomato sauce similar to marinara without oregano, but cooked in a covered pot and not in an open pan like marinara. However, our ragù were alla Bolognese or my father’s family’s ragù.

It is this latter ragù recipe that was brought to America by my paternal grandfather’s family and was served every Sunday in my home growing up. Although meat-based and slow-cooked, it is still quite soft and delicate as well as being a very hearty and comforting meal. The base is created with different cuts of meat, such as beef shin, short ribs, and pork ribs, all still on the bone, or even a pig’s foot, and browned slightly in oil. Meatballs made with ground beef, bread, garlic, parsley, egg, and Parmigiano are fried and set aside with the browned meat.I A tomato sauce is slowly cooked for a bit, then the meat and its juices are added, and a short while afterward, the meatballs and their juices are incorporated. Like most stews or ragù, it is best cooked the day before or early that morning and set aside to allow the flavors to gel. It is served with dried pasta, usually rigatoni, ziti rigati, or penne rigate. The reason for using pasta such as these is that the “rigati” or “corrugated” surfaces of ziti or penne hold the sauce much better than the smooth surfaces of their regular versions. (If I were to serve this with fresh pasta, I would use something like garganelli. These are corrugated tubular pasta made by rolling a square of dough around a pencil-size dowel from one corner to another over a small ridged wooden paddle.)