Ragù della Domenica -- The Sunday Ragù
This has never once been on the laminated menu. On Sundays the restaurant does not open until two, which in a town like Montesorra counts as a minor scandal, and the reason is this pot, which goes on the stove at eight in the morning and does not come off until my mother says so and not one minute before.
My father calls it ragù alla bolognese when he is trying to impress someone, and Sunday sauce the rest of the time. Put this over spaghetti in front of him and expect a lecture that will outlast the meal. Tagliatelle -- wide, flat, eggy tagliatelle -- or nothing. It is the one rule in this house that has never once been up for debate, not even from the children who left for university and came back with opinions.
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 medium yellow onion, finely diced
- 2 carrots, finely diced
- 2 celery stalks, finely diced
- 150g pancetta, finely diced
- 500g coarse-ground beef, a fattier cut if you can get it
- 300g ground pork
- 1 cup dry white wine
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste
- 1 cup passata, or crushed tomatoes
- 1 to 1½ cups whole milk, warmed
- Salt and black pepper
- Whole nutmeg, for grating
- Fresh tagliatelle and grated Parmesan, to serve
Makes enough for eight to ten with a proper appetite, or six of us on a Sunday when Salvatore is home and eating for two.
Cookware Required
- una pentola pesante (a heavy pot, for the soffritto and the long simmer)
- un cucchiaio di legno (a wooden spoon)
- una grattugia per la noce moscata (a small grater, for the nutmeg)
Method
Melt the butter with the olive oil in a heavy pot over low heat, then add the onion, carrots, and celery. This is the soffritto, and the only instruction that matters here is patience: fifteen minutes at least, stirring now and then, until the vegetables have gone soft and pale and sweet, and none of them have taken on any color. Color at this stage means the heat was too high, and the sweetness you were building is gone before you started.
Add the pancetta and let it render slowly into the vegetables, another five minutes, until the kitchen smells the way it has every Sunday morning of my life.
Raise the heat and add the beef and pork together, breaking them apart with a wooden spoon. You are not browning this meat so much as convincing it to let go of its pink; five minutes is usually enough. My mother's hand goes still over the pot at exactly the right moment, and I have never once been able to explain how she knows it, only that she does.
Pour in the wine and let it bubble hard, scraping up everything stuck to the bottom of the pot, until you can no longer smell the alcohol. Put your face right over it if you have to. If you can still smell the wine, it isn't ready, and adding the tomato now would be a mistake you'd taste for the next three hours.
Stir in the tomato paste and the passata, just enough to turn the pot red-brown rather than red. This is a meat sauce, not a tomato sauce. If you can taste more tomato than meat, you have made a different, lesser dish by accident.
Turn the heat down as low as your stove allows, cover the pot most of the way, leaving a gap for steam to escape, and leave it alone for three hours, stirring occasionally and resisting the urge to do anything else to it. This is the part of the recipe that cannot be rushed by a better cook or a hotter stove. The three hours is not a suggestion.
In the last thirty minutes, stir in the warm milk. This is the step most people skip, and the one my mother will not let anyone skip: it rounds off the sharp edge the wine and tomato leave behind, and it is the difference between a sauce that tastes cooked and a sauce that tastes like it was made by someone who loves the people eating it.
Salt and pepper it only now, tasting as you go, and grate in a little nutmeg at the very end, off the heat. Serve over tagliatelle, never spaghetti, with more Parmesan than you think you're allowed.
Quando Va Storto
If the sauce tastes like tomato soup with meat floating in it, you added too much tomato too early, or you didn't give it the full three hours to let the tomato retreat into the background where it belongs; there is no fixing this batch, only remembering for next time. If it's greasy on top, skim it. Every good ragù throws some fat, and a spoon is the only tool you need. If the meat is tough instead of falling apart, the heat was too high at some point during the three hours and the sauce boiled instead of simmered; turn it down, and next time, walk away from the pot more than you think you should. And if it tastes flat no matter what you do, you very likely rushed or skipped the wine and the milk, the two ingredients in this recipe that do their work quietly and get blamed for nothing when they're missing.
Keeps four or five days in the refrigerator and freezes without complaint for months, which is the only reason the restaurant can get away with serving it exactly one day a week.