HANDS OFF MY SPAG BOL!
What sauce! The Mayor of Bologna says Britain’s favourite dish doesn’t exist. To which TOM PARKER BOWLES (who was weaned on it by his mother Camilla) declares . . .
FRANKLY, I think I’m going mad. Stir-crazy. Round the flipping bend. There I was, on Sunday, softening chopped onions, celery and carrots in a shimmering pool of olive oil, just about to add the minced beef, when things took a turn for the odd.
‘ In other news,’ purred the newsreader on the radio, ‘ The Mayor of Bologna has declared spaghetti bolognese does not exist.’ You what? I started to brown the meat, perplexed and not a little alarmed. Was this not spag bol I saw before me? And, if not, what would my children eat for tea?
As the meat turned from dark crimson to light tan, I sought advice. ‘Um, kids, any idea as to the contents of this pan?’ Both looked up, sighed theatrically and returned to wrestling with the dog.
‘It’s spaghetti bolognese. Obviously,’ muttered my daughter, 11, while my son, just nine, rolled his eyes and nodded.
Yup, thought so. I boiled away the red wine, threw in a great splodge of tomato puree, turned the heat to a simmer and retired to the sofa in triumph. The nation’s ‘ Official Favourite Dish’ (according to a 2018 survey) does exist.
NOW, I get Mayor Virginio Merola’s point. Ragu alla Bolognese is a classic dish from northern Italy, in which a slowcooked meat sauce called ragu (made with either beef or a mix of beef and pork) meets fresh tagliatelle pasta.
There are strict rules as to what goes in, although — this being Italy — no one agrees what they are.
Spag bol, on the other hand, is basically mince with onions and tomato. Plus everything from ketchup to garlic, basil, carrots, thyme, Marmite, chocolate, coffee granules, Worcestershire sauce and chilli. It’s served with dried spaghetti.
No wonder the Mayor called the British dish ‘fake news’. We’ve been here before: a couple of years ago, the late, great chef Antonio Carluccio claimed that Brits had ruined ragu by adding herbs. And Mary Berry ran into trouble by using white wine (which I have seen in ‘authentic’ recipes from Bologna) and double cream for her version.
But I get the feeling that the Mayor’s outburst last weekend was cynically calculated to stir up controversy. It’s a reliable trick: when no one’s paying you much attention as Mayor of Bologna, drag out the old spag bol spat and let battle recommence. I admit spaghetti bolognese, as we know it in this country, is about as authentically Bolognese as I am. Some say Italian emigrants invented it in America, others that those same immigrants created it in Soho, London, in the Fifties.
But, more than a cross- cultural hybrid, spag bol soothes and delights, a taste of childhood that resonates deep into adult life.
Just as T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock measures out his life in coffee spoons, so I chart my everadvancing years (I’m 44) in tales of spaghetti bolognese. I’ve probably eaten it more than any other dish: even more than burgers and hot dogs (both immigrant dishes, too).
It was a staple of my youth, made from good butcher’s mince by my mother, with little else other than a chopped onion and squeeze of Sainsbury’s tomato puree. Inauthentically, there was always more sauce than pasta. (In Italy, pasta is daintily anointed, not drowned.)
Worse, it was finished with lashings of that dusty, foul-smelling cheese-powder that came in a cardboard cylinder and would probably have emerged unscathed from a nuclear war.
Not that that bothered us two ravenous children, faced with the tea to beat them all.
Simple, but by God we loved it. Just as we adored the stuff on holiday in southern Italy. Not for us the zuppa di cozze (mussel soup) and oozingly lactic burrata cheese, nor spaghetti con vongole (clams) or the baked pasta dish, Sformato Ferdinando. Nope, for my sister, me and my cousins, it was spaghetti bolognese. With chips. Every lunch and dinner. For two weeks.
Back in London, and lunch with my grandmother in old-fashioned trattorias like Mimmo D’Ischia on Elizabeth Street and La Fontana on the Pimlico Road (both now gone the way of all flesh).
WE MIGhT have tried an occasional grilled veal paillard. But, really, the waiters never needed to ask. Spaghetti bolognese, per favore. And molto,
molto parmesan. They knew Brits liked it with mince rather than a slow-cooked hunk of beef. And that was fine. For most Italians, regional authenticity is important — but so, too, are generosity and good manners. Give the children what they want.
At prep school, I found out how deranged this dish could be — onions, hideously burnt while still somehow raw, mixed with ketchup and mince that was grey, gristled and greasy. That wasn’t food: it was the definition of dyspeptic disgust.
Forced through the grinder of British institutional eating in the Seventies and Eighties, it had no chance. But it’s a dish I continued to cook throughout my life. Student stand-by, saviour of the dreary dinner party, a crucial Cupid’s arrow in the search for true love.
As I grew older, the ingredients got better, but if you could chop an onion and turn on a gas ring, you were halfway there. It was slowcooked succour, seasoned with nostalgia and greed. These days I add sliced pancetta and, whisper it, chicken livers, garlic and even double cream. Because this is my spag bol, and this is the way I make it.
The recipe my children so adore may be nearer to a classic ragu alla Bolognese. But I still serve it with spaghetti, swamped in sauce, and covered in a blizzard of parmesan — albeit freshly grated.
So no, Signore Mayor, this is not a Bolognan dish. It never has been — and you knew that all along. But it does exist here as a true domestic classic, homage and hybrid at once. A dish unbound by formal strictures, and all the better for it.
Spag bol may have no place in Bologna. But in Britain, it’s a true taste of home.