BRETT MARTIN Email: Phone: 718-399-9887 THE PERFECT RAGU Details - September, 2003 Making a rich, meaty authentic Bolognese sauce is almost as easy as opening a can. Download PDF version (808K) Comenciare. "To begin..." Verbs. They were all I had to navigate paradise. I was 10 minutes off the train in Modena, Italy, and standing in the kitchen at Hosteria Giusti, a four-table restaurant in the back of a 400-year old salumeria. And I was completely at the mercy of my miserable, bastardized version of menu Italian, chef Laura Galli's much better but hardly complete grasp of English, some shared Spanish, and--my lifeline--a book of Italian verbs. Verbs, I reasoned, are the guts of language, in the same way that technique is the heart of cooking. They would have to be enough for my mission: apprendere--"to learn." Specifically, to learn how to make ragu Bolognese. At this point, you might be a bit confused. After all, Ragu, the brand name, represents the worst of what the fine tradition of pasta and sauce has come to on this side of the Atlantic--overcooked noodles heated in your dorm room hot pot and covered with a jarful of fluorescent glop. The thick, slow-cooked ragu Bolognese, on the other hand, is one of the world's great gastronomic achievements. And here's the beauty part: Making it is nearly as easy as opening that jar. So easy, in fact, that Laura Galli seemed puzzled at my request for a lesson. Galli is 51 and the matriarch of both restaurant and salumeria. Her husband, Adriano Morandi, mans the store and acts as maitre d'; her son Matteo handles the books; and her daughter Cecilia assists in the kitchen along with four other girls. They all looked at me as though I were, frankly, a tad retarded. "You want to learn to make ragu?" Galli asked. I nodded and consulted my book for the verb that means "to beg". I had been in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna for a week. In the space of a few days, I had eaten bologna (or at least Oscar Mayer's original inspiration, mortadella) in Bologna, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese in Reggio Emiia, and prosciutto di Parma in Parma. My plan had been to add "ragu Bolognese in Bologna" to the list but Laura Galli's transatlantic reputation more than justified expanding my scope 25 miles northwest to Modena, itself famous as the source of balsamic vinegar. Modena, Bologna, Parma, and the other cities of Emilia-Romagna are all within an hour's drive of one another, but that doesn't mean they agree on how to make the perfect Bolognese. "Everybody has a different recipe--a little more of this, a little less of that," says Giovanni Tamburini, owner of Bologna's magnificent AF. Tamburini salumeria. Tamburini's mother made her ragu exclusively with pork. At Ristorante Diana, a Bologna institution staffed with waiters in white tuxedos, chef Mauro Fabbri insisted that the dish should be made with beef and only beef. Laura Galli, on the other hand, had set out equal parts ground beef, pork, and veal--a lovely multicolored triptych neatly matched by a nearby dish containing chopped raw onion, carrot, and celery. I instinctively favored Galli's meat combination on the theory that nothing has ever been made worse by the addition of pork and veal. She took a large terra cotta bowl, covered the bottom with olive oil and a pat of butter, and turned the stove to high. Then she added the vegetables and cooked them until the onions were translucent and the celery and carrots nearly melded into a riotously colorful sludge. In went a lump of chopped pancetta, and then the rest of the meat. "Mescolare," she said--"to mix." Reproducing the dish at home, I learned that stirring the meat until it loses its raw color is by far the most demanding step of an exceedingly simple process. Galli, of course, did it without breaking a sweat. She grated a tiny bit of nutmeg into the pot. Then she added a cup of red wine, allowed it to boil off, and poured in a bowl of crushed tomatoes, creating a soupy, oily mess. She wiped her hands on her apron. "That is ragu Bolognese," she said with a shrug. Then she kicked me out of her kitchen. Aspettore. "To wait." Tom Petty wasn't kidding. When I said that the stirring was the hardest part, I was lying. The hardest part was containing myself for the three hours the ragu would take to cook. It was cold and drizzly in Modena's main square, the Piazza Grande, and heavily made-up women in fur coats passed by on bicycles, putting me in mind of an ecological disaster in Palm Springs. I arrived back at Hosteria Giusti as close to three hours later as patience would allow. Adriano had lowered the gate on the salumeria and replaced his apron with a dinner jacket. A foursome of wealthy looking patrons were chattering over a bottle of wine in the dining room. I peeked into the kitchen. Boccheggiore--"to gasp." The ragu had cooked down to a dark, rich, steaming sauce the color of the earthenware pot it sat in. I ducked back into the dining room, ready to eat. In America, Bolognese sauce is often served with spaghetti. This is never true in Italy, where the traditional pasta for ragu is either a fresh, flat egg noodle like tagliatelle or pappardelle or, if you must use dried pasta, a large cut such as ziti or rigatoni. The idea is to choose a pasta that provides an ample platform for the thick, meaty sauce so you aren't left with the equivalent of sloppy joe at the bottom of the bowl. Galli served me soft, spongy homemade tagliatelle topped with a spoonful of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. After one bite, I understood. Just as all the ingredients of the ragu had coalesced into a single dish, the pasta had become more than a mere vehicle for the sauce. The whole thing was an astoundingly deep, complex, unified whole. All too soon, it was over. It was time to start preparing tomorrow's meal. Galli and her family packed me, reeling a bit, onto the train back to Bologna. In my pocket was the ragu recipe, though Galli still seemed amused by my insistence that I would need one. "It is very easy," she assured me. I believed her, but it didn't change my one overwhelming wish at that moment: ritornore--"to return." All material copyright 1998-2005 Brett Martin