RAGÙ AND ME
One taste of tagliatelle al ragù in Bologna was all it took to be hooked, writes JOHN IRVING, but it was merely the tip of a pasta-sauce obsession.
One small taste of tagliatelle al ragù was all it took to be hooked on pasta sauce, writes John Irving.
It was the mid-1970s and I was about to read Italian at the University of Edinburgh. My knowledge of the language was limited to the bits and bobs I’d picked up from the stilted dialogues of BBC TV courses and phrasebooks. I’d never been out of the UK before, never mind to Italy, the country of my teenage dreams. So, Eurail Pass ticket in my pocket and rucksack on my back, I set off for a month travelling around the country before the degree course began. It was a chance at last to visit the art towns I’d only read about and eat the food I’d only ever seen in photographs. I spent a lot of time on trains, but if they were running late, if I had a long time to wait, all the better. Back then, every Italian station, even the smallest, had a trattoria of its own, serving basic but delicious local food. And if I was just passing through, there were hawkers on the platforms selling the same stuff from stainless-steel cooking carts.
Which brings me to ragù and an epiphany on a platform in Bologna station. An elderly white-coated man was bawling his wares – “Tagliatelle al ragù! Tagliatelle al ragù!” – and I was on a train headed for
Florence. I asked for a portion. He spooned it into a foil tray and handed it up through the compartment window. I knew what tagliatelle were, but ragù? What was that? It turned out to be what I knew as sugo di carne, meat sauce: rich and unctuous, with only the slightest hint of tomato, as is the Bolognese way, more burnt umber than red, highly addictive.
After that, I ordered ragù wherever I went – and contrived complicated detours to go through Bologna station whenever I could. I was supposed to be having a total immersion in the Italian language but I was drowning in Italian pasta sauce.
Like many other Italian culinary terms – such as besciamella (béchamel), say, or fricassea (fricassée) or crespella (crêpe) – the word ragù comes from French. From ragoût: meat, fish or vegetables, cut into pieces and stewed. And ragù alla Bolognese is the ragù par excellence. Antonella Campanini, a food historian from Reggio Emilia, near Bologna, tells me that, in her opinion, ragù alla Bolognese started being ladled over pasta – in Bologna, egg pasta – in the late 18th century. She reckons it was the fortunate invention of someone in a kitchen somewhere.
After which, slowly but surely, cooking it became a collective practice. What we call traditions are often incidental to kitchen accidents.
By the early 20th century, ragù consumption was firmly established in Bologna, La Grassa, “The Fat One”, so nicknamed on account of its citizens’ liking for lavish food. In the 1920s, as part of the Fascist plan to give Italians a “frugal, warrior lifestyle” – to toughen them up for the bellicose empire-building to come
– a watered-down ragù surrogate called Condit was introduced to the city. It was supposed to replace the sumptuous original, but it never caught on. Neither did the Fascist attempt to Italianise ragù into ragutto. I’ve never heard the word used and know no one who remembers it. The inhabitants of Bologna and the surrounding Emilia-Romagna region weren’t going to let Mussolini mess with the name of their beloved sauce, still less screw up the ingredients.
Yet just as there are wine tasters who are teetotallers, so there are Bolognesi who can’t abide ragù. Campanini herself detests it. “I’m repelled by the idea of minced meat cooked in liquid coming into contact with soft pasta. All that gooeyness. Yuck!” De gustibus non disputandum est, but she’s definitely in the minority. A student from Bologna I once knew told me he ate ragù six days a week. A good Catholic, on Fridays he ate fish.
The “official” recipe for ragù – involving minced beef, pancetta, white or red wine, beef broth, a spot of tomato passata or purée, milk, onion, carrot, celery, salt and pepper – was registered at the Bologna Chamber of Commerce in 1982. It was chosen randomly from a shortlist of 20 or so, which goes to show that domestic cooking recipes aren’t really recipes at all – everyone does their own thing. Nor is ragù alla Bolognese the only Italian ragù. Travel around the country and you’ll find countless variations on the theme: the game sauces of Central Italy made with wild boar, venison or hare; the veal and mushroom tocco of Liguria; the chicken liver and sausage concoctions of Piedmont; the ragù di stridoli, a delicacy of Romagna featuring the leaves of the bladder campion, a wild flower. All just drops in the ragù ocean.
On that first train journey of mine, I travelled no further south than Rome. If I had, I would have discovered that in Naples the plot – or rather, the ragù – thickens. Literally so. Ragù Napoletano, in fact, consists of whole chunks of beef or pork, sometimes with the addition of stuffed veal roulades, sausage and meatballs – slow-braised in tomato sauce. It starts to cook at the crack of dawn (if not the night before)
and continues until lunchtime, allowing the meat to soften, the sauce to densify. The best was once said to be the ragù dei portieri, ragù of the doorkeepers, whose job allowed them to keep one eye on the front door and one on the bubbling pot.
If ragù alla Bolognese’s function is to dress pasta, or occasionally rice and polenta, with ragù Napoletano you have the makings of a meal. First, the brick-red sauce goes onto the pasta, preferably penne, rigatoni, paccheri or ziti. Then, for the second course, the meat is sliced and served with broccoli rabe. If there’s any leftover sauce, it’s eaten the next day with fried eggs or rice. In the late 18th century, as capital of a kingdom that comprised most of the southern mainland and the whole of Sicily, Naples was one of the largest cities in Europe. In the teeming metropolis, class borders ran like fresh paint. “Beggars, princes and bishops jostle each other in every street,” noted Mark Twain. Likewise, the refined cuisine of the French-trained chefs, or monzù (a Neapolitan corruption of monsieur) of the Bourbon court and the noble palazzi intermingled with the food of the poor, the mangiamaccheroni, or macaroni-eaters.
In the case of ragù Napoletano, the use of meat was patrician, eating it with pasta plebeian.
If Bolognesi flirt with their ragù, Neapolitans are involved in a love affair that borders on the obsessive
The inhabitants of Bologna weren’t going to let Mussolini mess with their beloved sauce.
with theirs, rraù in dialect. In the theatre, the playwright Eduardo De Filippo’s 1959 comedy, Sabato, Domenica e Lunedì (Saturday, Sunday and Monday), about a weekend in the life of the Priore family, goes into much detail about mamma Rosa’s ragù. In real life, in the early 1960s, Pina Maurana was taken by her fiancé to meet his family over Sunday lunch. She was treated to what she still describes as “the most spectacular ragù I’ve ever eaten”. Yet her fiancé and his four brothers spent the whole meal finding fault with the finer points of their mother’s masterpiece.
Pina’s fiancé, now her husband, was Antonio
Mattozzi, a food expert and member of a dynasty of pizzeria owners and restaurateurs. He and his brothers knew what they were talking about but their attitude was at variance with Eduardo De Filippo’s in his poem, ‘O rraù. Here the speaker criticises his wife’s efforts as mere “carne c’ ‘a pummarola”, meat and tomatoes. For him, the only real ragù is the one his mamma used to make. Which seems a fittingly Neapolitan way to conclude.