Ragu Bolognese

I got this wonderful book from my mother in law. It’s called Napoli in Bocca, written by Antonella Santolini, published in 1980 and it looks like it was from early 1900s.

Quaint doesn’t even start to describe it: the paper is thick dark parchment, the recipes look like handwritten, there are lovely sketches illustrating the book and the language of the English versions is simply beautiful. The recipes are authentically weird: you know it must be a true indigenous dish if it doesn’t resemble its bastardised pan-European version in the ingredients’ list. Pizza features peeled, sliced tomatoes – no faffing about with sauce. Spaghetti is really called vermicelli. There’s no minestrone because ‘minestra’ means just ‘soup’, but there is tripe soup and fried pork soup – who knew?

Carne al ragu – we are not in Bologna anymore, Toto – sounds astonishing to a pan-European reader whose concept of a spag bol is pasta drowned in what is effectively a burger dispersed in bad tomato sauce. Ragu de Napoli does not contain meat (you read right). A hefty chunk of beef is cooked for hours with aromatics then removed, leaving richly flavoured sauce used to enrich (not smother) pasta served as a starter. The meat is served for the main course. Naturally. That’s the right Italian way we see and approve but follow the worse way: a bucketful of pasta swimming in sauce, and eaten as a main course.

So halfway house, I thought, not to introduce too dramatic a change:  keep the beef mince in but follow the flavouring and method instructions. It came out supremely tasty. The amount of about 3-4 tablespoons of the sauce per person gives the perfect balance between Italian sparsity and British overload. The pasta tastes fantastic but you can hardly see the sauce or the meat – which is the whole point. See, approve and follow.