La Grassa. The fat one. Bologna has earned its nickname like no other place on Earth. The old city is awash in excess calories, a medieval fortress town fortified with golden mountains of starch and red cannons of animal fat, where pastas gleam a brilliant yellow from the lavish amount of egg yolks they contain and menus moan under the weight of their meat- and cheese-burdened offerings.
I had long dreamed of nuzzling up to Bologna’s ample waistline. As a high school kid with a burgeoning romance with the kitchen, I was hungry to consummate my love with what I regarded as the world’s finest cuisine. The intermediary was a young, heavyset Italian American named Mario Batali. Every morning at 10:30 during summer break, I sank into our Chianti red couch and watched the chef with orange clogs and a matching ponytail motormouth his way across Italy, breaking down the regional cooking of the country in exquisite three-plate daily tasting menus. I wanted to taste the swollen breads of Puglia, the neon green pestos of Liguria, the simmering fish stews of Le Marche, the pepper-bombed pastas of Lazio. But, above all, I wanted to feast on the Italy of Molto Mario’s most spirited episodes, the Italy of Parmigiano (“the undisputed king of cheeses!”), of mortadella and culatello, and, of course, the Italy of ragù alla bolognese, the most lavish and revered of all pasta creations.
It took a broken heart to bring me to Bologna’s bulging belly. I fell in love with a girl in Barcelona who didn’t share my lofty feelings, so I escaped to Bologna to drown my rejection in a bottomless bowl of meat sauce. For three weeks I sought out ragù in any form possible: caught in the tangles of fresh tagliatelle, plugging the tiny holes of cheesy tortellini, draped over forest green handkerchiefs of spinach lasagne.
Since the dawn of Christianity, Emilia-Romagna—birthplace of ragù, home of the city of Bologna—has been one of Europe’s wealthiest regions, a center of trade with a heavy agricultural presence. Few things say wealth as loudly as a sauce made up of three or four cuts of meat, two kinds of fat, wine, milk, and a flurry of one of the world’s most treasured cheeses—all served on a pasta so dense with egg yolk it looks like a sunset run through a paper shredder.
Slow-simmered meat-based stews were common throughout Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but pasta, a luxury enjoyed by the upper class until the Industrial Revolution made wheat more accessible, didn’t enter the equation until the early nineteenth century, when the aristocrats of Emilia-Romagna found it in their hearts and wallets to combine the two. Pellegrino Artusi, a successful businessman and noted gastronome, is often credited with the first published recipe for ragù alla bolognese, dating back to 1891 in the self-published Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. Not satisfied with the panoply of meats and cooking fats, Artusi recommended goosing the dish with porcini, chicken livers, sliced truffles, and a glass of heavy cream.
Just as Artusi’s version reflected his privileged times as a wealthy merchant carousing about Emilia-Romagna in the mid–nineteenth century, ragù has always been a barometer of sorts, a dish that closely mirrors the conditions of its makers. Substantial meat-heavy ragùs took hold in the relatively fat times of the early twentieth century, but in the hardscrabble years after World War II, pasta found itself nearly naked, slicked with lard and vegetable scraps and little else. Only as Italy climbed out of the postwar depression in the 1950s and ’60s did meat rejoin the recipe as the central constituent.
Over the years, other parts of Italy developed their own take on the bubbling meat sauce. (And let it be said now that sauce is a misnomer—sauce implies a level of liquidity that you’ll never find in a true ragù. Instead, the Italians would call it a condimento, a condiment meant to accompany the pasta, not smother it relentlessly.) Ragù alla barese, from the heart of Puglia, is made from thin slices of meat—pork, beef, lamb, even horse—with the sauce served over orecchiette, ear-shaped pasta, and the protein eaten separately. Italy’s second most famous ragù after Bologna’s belongs to Naples, where a giant vat of tomato sauce is used to render huge chunks of meat fork tender (the inspiration for Italian America’s Sunday gravy). But the scope of ragù goes well beyond these famous offshoots: travel Italy today, and you’ll find ragù made from fish, duck, and wild boar, laced with everything from cumin to dried chili to chocolate.
Through all those years and all those iterations, Emilia-Romagna has remained ground zero of Italy’s ragù culture, but even here the differences between one village’s ragù and the next’s can be a catalyst for controversy and recrimination.
Of course, uniformity was never part of the equation: from the start, ragù alla bolognese has been a reflection of subtle differences in terrain, weather, and wealth that defined one town from the next throughout the region.
Today, the list of variables runs longer than the list of ingredients. Is ragù pure pork? Pure beef? A mixture? Is the meat ground, chopped by hand, or braised and then shredded? Does pancetta or another type of cured pork product belong in the mix? How about liquid: stock or water, red wine or white? In some parts of the region, where dairy cows are aplenty, milk makes it into the sauce; in other parts, it’s considered a sacrilege. Spices: salt, maybe pepper, usually bay leaf; sometimes, in rare cases, nutmeg.
The biggest source of dispute, undoubtedly, is the tomato: How much, if any? Fresh, canned, or tomato paste?
So is there one true ragù? One best way to make it? One expression of this meaty amalgam that best represents the DNA of this region? That’s what I’ve come back to Emilia-Romagna to find out.
* * *
Twenty miles outside of Bologna, at a roadside restaurant, I meet Alessandro Martini, short and thick and boiling over with life. He runs Italian Days Food Experience, a full-day binge on Emilia-Romagna’s most famous ingredients: cured meats, Parmigiano-Reggiano, aceto balsamico di Modena (“twelve years aging minimum!” as he likes to say). His Facebook page is dominated by pictures of tourists feeding each other pasta, hoisting massive hunks of cheese, slurping hundred-year-old balsamic vinegar from plastic spoons. On any given day, depending on the whims of Trip-Advisor’s algorithms, Alessandro’s tour is the most popular activity in all of Europe.
For a short period in 2010, Alessandro was my truffle dealer, sending freshly dug specimens across the Mediterranean to Barcelona, where I was then living, one kilo at a time. I would keep them under my pillow for a few days until my dreams smelled of tubers before selling them off to Michelin-starred chefs around Barcelona. I remember waking up to messages from Alessandro during those heady days after an early-morning truffle hunt: “I have the white gold!”
Alessandro hails from the heart of ragù country and lives for these types of belt-loosening food adventures. This is a man who celebrated the birth of both his son and daughter by gifting them with batteries of aceto balsamico—a series of wooden barrels that hold balsamic vinegar as it ages over the course of a lifetime. When I emailed him two weeks before the trip and asked him to be my guide, his answer was short and definitive: “Sì! Sì! We go to see the best Italian grandmas and the ragù kings. Don’t worry!”
We start at Ristorante Bonfiglioli in the hilltop town of Zocca. An hour before lunch service, the kitchen looks like what I imagine when I close my eyes at night and see Italy. All women, mostly grandmas, all performing backbreaking acts of an intensely nurturing and homemade nature. One rolls out long sheets of emerald green spinach pasta for lasagne verde. Another fries little rectangles of dough for gnocchi fritti. A pair of older women in bonnets stuff hundreds of pasta squares with a mix of ground pork, mortadella, and Parmesan before pinching them into tortellini. In the corner, over a lone burner, a younger woman stirs a pot that, judging by the savory perfume, can contain only one thing.
Beef or pork: the eternal ragù debate.
Alfredo Chiarappa
When Alessandro announces that we’ve come to talk ragù, the flurry of activity comes to a sudden halt and the women gather around the mountain of tortellini.
“Well, what do you want to know?” the young sauce stirrer asks. “Everything,” I say.
And that’s pretty much all it takes. The women launch into their personal recipes, exchanging barbs about protein choices and seasoning philosophies. Finally, Zia Maria Lanzarini, the oldest cook in the kitchen, quiets the crowd and offers some well-earned wisdom: “The meat can change based on the circumstances. The liquid can, too. But the one thing a ragù never has in it is garlic.”
The only other point of agreement among the group: ragù should be made with pignoletto, an acidic, lightly fruity wine that you can see growing by looking out of the restaurant’s windows. “It’s a Bolognese sauce, it should be made with a Bolognese wine.”
The official version at Bonfiglioli, what Alessandro calls “the noble ragù,” would be a source of controversy for most in the area—including, apparently, a few of the cooks in this kitchen. It is made from 100 percent beef, a rarity in the region but an act of recycling in a restaurant with mountains of beef scraps leftover from the strip steaks it is famous for. Those scraps are combined with onion, carrot, and celery, a few glugs of pignoletto, plus peeled and seeded fresh tomatoes, and simmered for four hours, the cook adding water at her discretion if the ragù starts to dry out.
“The cooking is the most important part. It must be slow,” says Signora Elena, Maria’s tortellini accomplice. “It’s the slow cooking that gives the sauce its flavor.”
She passes me a spoon, and the ragù, a gentle orange color from the emulsion of tomato and fat, sits up like a well-trained dog. It tastes of the mineral intensity of good Italian beef corrupted by nothing more than a light tomato acidity, the sweetness of the vegetables, and a whisper of wine in the background. The women try to ply us with other delights of the Emilian kitchen, and I start to give in, but Alessandro intercedes and ushers me to the door. The day is young.
Three hilltops over, at Trattoria Lina in Savigno, we sit down to a light lunch of spinach gramigne, hollow fish hooks of pasta, with sausage ragù; polpette, massive, dense meatballs made from pork, beef, chicken, mortadella, and an absurd amount of Parmesan; thick shanks of osso buco; tomato-braised rabbit alla cacciatora; and tortellini in brodo.
We are surrounded by cyclists, runners, large, spirited families—people in need of sustenance. Alessandro loves this restaurant, and for good reason: the food is intensely satisfying, especially the chewy pile of gramigne, hiding nubs of sausage in their knots, and the tortellini, another regional specialty, which are belly buttons of ground pork, mortadella, and Parmesan afloat in a clear, soul-soothing chicken broth.
But after a few bites of the ragù, he flashes me a look of disappointment: “I’m sorry, my friend. The ragù is good, it is fine, but there is too much doppio concentrato. Tomato paste has no place in ragù!” To hear Alessandro say these words about a restaurant he himself selected, one in which the owners greeted him with hugs and asked about his children, underscores just how hard it is to please an Italian—especially with ragù.
As we waddle our way back toward his van, he tells me: “These are great examples for a beginner, but later, I will show you the true ragù.”
Matt Goulding
* * *
The rest of the week in Emilia-Romagna is a blur of ground pork and durum wheat. I spend days in Bologna, plodding from one restaurant to the next, faithfully ordering tagliatelle al ragù even when my stomach cries out for clear liquids or a few green leaves of vegetation.
Bologna is my kind of town: ancient in its cobbled avenues but youthful in its constituency, big enough to capture a certain urban energy but small enough for you to never need anything other than your two feet to take it all in. Above all, it’s a civilization seemingly constructed for the sole purpose of eating.
Everywhere you turn you see signs of its place at the top of the Italian food chain: fresh-pasta shops vending every possible iteration of egg and flour; buzzing bars pairing Spritz and Lambrusco with generous spreads of free meat, cheese, and vegetable snacks; and, above all, osteria after osteria, cozy wine-soaked eating establishments from whose ancient kitchens emanates a moist fragrance of simmered pork and local grapes.
Osteria al 15 is a beloved dinner den just inside the centro storico known for its sprawling plates of charcuterie, its crispy flatbreads puffed up in hot lard, and its classic beef-heavy ragù tossed with corkscrew pasta or spooned on top of béchamel and layered between sheets of lasagne. It’s far from refined, but the bargain prices and the boisterous staff make it all go down easily.
Trattoria Gianni, down a hairpin alleyway a few blocks from Piazza Maggiore, was once my lunch haunt in Bologna, by virtue of its position next to my Italian-language school. I dream regularly of its bollito misto, a heroic mix of braised brisket, capon, and tongue served with salsa verde, but the dish I’m looking for this time, a thick beef-and-pork joint with plenty of jammy tomato, is a solid middle-of-the-road ragù.
Bologna’s finest casual restaurant, All’Osteria Bottega, is the kind of place you would do unholy things to have transplanted into your neighborhood. Everything—from the tortellini in brodo to the lasagne al forno to the heroic plates of thinly sliced mortadella and culatello—is a master class in Emilia-Romagna’s special brand of soulful sophistication. The ragù—chunky and rich, with only a whisper of tomato—finds a perfect delivery vessel in the eggy, toothsome tagliatelle.
The best ragù I taste in Bologna is a white ragù of rabbit folded between a dozen thin layers of lasagna, served at Pappagallo, a polished restaurant in the shadow of the two towers that climb from Bologna’s center. It is a paradigm of sophistication and refinement next to the hefty classic versions, but with bunny as its base, it is not a ragù that could bear the name of this city.
Any of these dishes would qualify as the best plate of pasta in your town or my town or any town outside of Italy, but there’s nothing that makes me want to change my return flight. Eventually, the Bologna ragù all begin to bleed together in a delicious but indiscernible pool of animal fat.
Alessandro has a simple explanation for my conundrum: “Bologna is not where you will find the best ragù. Too many tourists, too many students, not enough nonne. You must come with me to my town.”
* * *
Savigno is a lovely little village of two thousand people nestled in a valley framed by rivers and oak trees and the gentle humpbacks of humble vineyards—the kind of place you start mentally retiring to the second you lay eyes on it. Beyond being the capital of the region’s white truffle industry, Savigno is a major pillar in Emilia-Romagna’s ragù culture.
At Amerigo dal 1934, a restaurant famous throughout the region for its slow-simmered sauces and truffle-driven cuisine, Alberto Bettini and his family before him have spent the past eighty years refining the region’s most famous dish.
“There are thousands of recipes for ragù,” he says. “I can’t tell you one is right and the other is wrong. This is Italy: if you go five kilometers from here, you’ll find a completely different ragù.”
Nevertheless, a few axioms hold true across the spectrum of possibilities. Above all, Alberto espouses what could be the bedrock ethos of Italian cuisine. “The materia prima is the most important part. You can’t make good ragù with bad ingredients.”
His ragù begins the same way all ragù begin: with finely diced onion, carrot, and celery sautéed in olive oil, the sacred soffritto. “It’s important to really caramelize the vegetables. That’s where the flavor comes from.”
Later come two pounds of coarsely ground beef (“from the neck or shoulder—something with fat and flavor”) and a pound of ground pork butt, browned separately from the vegetables and deglazed with a cup of white wine (pignoletto, of course). Peeled tomatoes, tomato paste, bay leaves, and three hours of simmering over a low flame. Seasoning? “Salt. Never pepper.”
In the dining room, after an array of truffle-showered starters, Alberto serves us three ragù—a blind tasting of today’s and yesterday’s sauces, along with a jarred version he sells in upscale markets, so we can judge the effects of time and temperature on the final product. He doesn’t serve the ragù on tagliatelle, though, but on little rounds of toasted bread—the better for us to appreciate the subtleties of the sauce, he says.
Alessandro and I both immediately choose the day-old ragù. It’s not dramatically different, but the flavors are deeper, rounder, more harmonious. In all of them you taste the quality of the meat, the silken texture from the long simmer, the ghost of bay leaf. They are lovely creations, but there is perhaps too much tomato sweetness for the taste of a purist like Alessandro. He’s happy, but not euphoric—which is a state he hits a few times a day when he’s eating and drinking well.
For Alessandro, we seem to be perpetually one or two steps away from the one true thing, constantly circling the simmering pot, as if the dozen ragù we eat together around Savigno are all preludes to a more perfectly realized vision. “Come, my friend. I will show you how we do it at home.”
As we walk through Savigno, the copper light of dusk settling over the town’s narrow streets, we stop anyone we can find to ask for his or her ragù recipe. A retired policeman says he likes an all-pork sauce with a heavy hit of pancetta, the better for coating the pasta. A gelato maker explains that a touch of milk defuses the acidity of the tomato and ties the whole sauce together. Overhearing our kitchen talk below, an old woman in a navy cardigan pokes her head out of a second-story window to offer her take on the matter: “I only use tomatoes from my garden—fresh when they’re in season, preserved when it gets cold.”
Inspired by the Savigno citizenry, we buy meat from the butcher, vegetables and wine from a small stand in the town’s piazza, and head to Alessandro’s house to simmer up his version of ragù: two parts chopped skirt steak, one part ground pancetta, the sautéed vegetable trio, a splash of dry white wine, and a few canned San Marzano tomatoes.
“People talk about materia prima, materia prima, then they dump in a bunch of doppio concentrato. Vaffanculo!”
We leave the ragù to simmer and race off into the hills above Savigno to meet with Alessandro’s truffle dealers (“the truffle season doesn’t start until Tuesday, so don’t tell them you’re a journalist”). The sauce we return to, one that took all of fifteen minutes of active preparation to create, is straightforward and beautifully balanced, an honest expression of the handful of ingredients we put into the pot.
It’s clear that after years of dedicated pasta consumption across all corners of this region, Alessandro has learned a few things about ragù.
“We’re getting closer,” he tells me.
* * *
The tagliatelle al ragù at Osteria Francescana in Modena stands six inches tall and costs $55. It also takes a battery of chefs and nearly seventy-two hours to make. Its height, price, and layers of manipulation, at the very least, are befitting a restaurant of Francescana’s stature: it has three Michelin stars and is currently ranked number one in Restaurant magazine’s list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
Massimo Bottura, Francescana’s wildeyed Captain Nemo, is no stranger to controversy when it comes to his treatment of the sacred pillars of Italian cuisine. When he first opened Osteria Francescana in 1995, Modenese grandmas were lining up to bash him with their rolling pins. One of his first enduring creations, a dish that morphed five different Parmesan cheeses into five different textures (a twenty-four-month pudding, a fifty-month “air”), prompted the type of rabid public reactions you’d expect for a politician selling state secrets to the enemy.
In Italy, where dishes pass from one generation to the next without as much as a grain of salt out of place, evolution doesn’t come easily. Massimo’s great contribution to Italy’s modern food culture is his willingness to challenge the notion that Italian cuisine is already a fully realized vision, a museumworthy collection of perfectly conceived dishes that can only be weakened by modern intervention. That’s not untrue: few people on this planet can do as much with five ingredients as the Italians. Cacio e pepe, pasta alla carbonara, pizza Margherita: in their most honest iterations, they are near-perfect foods, deeply revered as expressions of the richness of Italian culture, and most God-fearing countrymen will be damned to watch a half-mad chef fuck with their formulations in search of his own stardom.
But Massimo—a man who finds culinary inspiration in Walt Whitman and Miles Davis—never saw it like that. Like the other heavyweights of the postmodern cooking world—Ferran Adrià in northern Spain, England’s Heston Blumenthal—he sees food as a medium for man’s greatest ambitions: experimentation, transformation, accelerated evolution. “We don’t want to lose our history, but we don’t want to lose ourselves in it, either. That’s why we are always asking ourselves questions about the best way to do things.”
The best way, according to Massimo, isn’t always the traditional way, and that didn’t sit well with certain people in this country, especially in conservative Modena. It wasn’t until Massimo won over international critics and achieved global fame that he managed to convince locals. “Suddenly they started to defend me.” (And for anybody who continued to doubt him, he won the gold medal for the best balsamic vinegar in Modena, the most revered craft in one of the most tradition-driven cities in Italy—a barrel-aged middle finger to those who think he knows only how to manipulate.)
A pan of tagliatelle al ragù from Amerigo dal 1934.
Alfredo Chiarappa
He’s in the middle of recounting his vinegar triumph when an old man with a bike at his side pokes his head into the door to ask Massimo a question. “Mi scusi, maestro! Maestro!” The chef stands up from his desk and greets the man like a great don of the neighborhood. When he returns, he flashes a grin and raised eyebrows: “See that? Now they call me maestro!”
The master has strong opinions about everything, especially ragù. While the differences from restaurant to restaurant and grandma to grandma tend to be minimal, especially to the outside eater, Massimo’s two main pillars of ragù are nothing short of controversial in this highly charged world. First he insists that the meat shouldn’t be ground before cooking but rather cooked in large pieces, then shredded by hand. “Ninety-nine percent of ragù starts with machine-ground meat. But why?” He insists that big pieces of braised meat give deeper flavor and better texture to the final dish.
Massimo’s Second Law of Ragù is even more explosive: no tomato. “We never had tomatoes in Emilia-Romagna, so how did they end up in the sauce? Tomato is used to cover up bad ingredients.”
In some dusty corner of the Emilian culinary history Massimo’s version may have its antecedent, but the ragù he fabricates is a severe departure from everything else I’ve tasted so far. Though the individual components of the dish constitute a showcase of the avant-garde technique and fuck-the-rules philosophy that characterizes so many of the world’s most lauded restaurants today, the final result tastes deeply, gloriously of ragù.
“Vision is the crossroads between the rational and the emotional,” says Massimo in one of his frequent moments of existential reflection in the dining room. The rational mind says that hand-torn meat rich in gelatin will make a lusty, powerful sauce with no need for excess ingredients. The emotional one tells him that it must still look and taste like home.
Later in the meal, the full extent of Massimo’s whimsy-driven modernist vision will be on display—in a handheld head of baby lettuce whose tender leaves hide the concentrated tastes of a Caesar salad, a glazed rectangle of eel made to look as if it were swimming up the Po River, a handful of classics with ridiculous names such as “Oops! I dropped the lemon tart”—but it’s the ragù that moves me the most. The noodles have a brilliant, enduring chew, and the sauce, rich with gelatin from the tougher cuts of meat, clings to them as if its life were at stake.
Most Italians would laugh at the price tag and blush at the modernist art–strewn room in which it is consumed—a poor replacement for their nonna’s kitchen, they’d say—but with a twirl of a fork, the sculptures and canvases and credit card payments would disappear and all that would remain is a taste of childhood.
Time and nostalgia add intensity to the flavors of our earliest memories, and in many ways the mission of modernist kitchens playing with sacred staples of home cooking is to find ways to make the reality live up to the impossibility of the memory. In the case of Massimo’s ragù, that means making the noodles with a thousand egg yolks, then cooking them in a concentrated Parmesan broth. That means braising nothing but the richest cuts of meat at very low temperatures for a very long time, then pulling them apart by hand to make a sauce of extraordinary depth and intensity. That means twisting the noodles into a tight spiral so that the pasta towers above the plate, the same way it does in the memories of those who eat it.
While I work my way down the tower to the bottom of the bowl, all I can think about is that this is why so many of us fantasize about being Italian, because to be Italian means to have memories that taste of this plate of pasta.
Nonna Anna filling the well for a batch of tagliatelle.
Alfredo Chiarappa
* * *
At 5:30 P.M. in the village rec room of Savigno, a cabal of ragù-making grandmas has assembled at a long wooden table. Alessandro has convened an emergency council, calling on the time-tested nonne of this scenic town to—hopefully—bring a final bit of clarity to the murky issue of Emilia-Romagna’s slow-cooked sauce. He seems concerned that I still haven’t fully understood ragù—that perhaps my mind has been clouded by the tourist-friendly osterie of Bologna and the Michelin-friendly pageantry of Modena. “Don’t you worry, amico. If anyone knows something about making ragù, it is this group of nonne.”
It is a comic-book cast of grandmother shapes and sizes: There’s Lisetta, tall with a thick wave of black hair. Maria Pia, midsized, modest, and crowned with a dark half-fro. Anna no. 1, short, plump, square-faced, and generously jowled. And Anna no. 2, smallest in size, largest in stature among the old ladies, a woman who not only directed the famous pasta program at Amerigo dal 1934 but twice traveled to Tokyo to take ragù to the people of Japan. “I walked into the subway, and there I was, larger than life, making pasta on a Japanese billboard. Madonna!”
Anna’s far-flung adventures notwithstanding, these are women born and raised in this fertile valley of golden grapes and hidden tubers. They have ragù in their soul.
I have a long list of questions that have been vibrating in my head over the past week—about the deployment of dairy, the browning of proteins, the ever-controversial issue of tomato. But ultimately I manage only one feeble query—“How does everyone here make their ragù?”—before the council takes over and I’m rendered a silent spectator.
“Piano piano,” says Lisetta; slowly, step by step. “You cannot rush a good ragù.”
“The 1950s were full of misery,” says Anna no. 2. “Back then ragù was just a bit of tomato and onion and lard. It changed slowly over the years, when people had more money to buy meat. A little pork, a little pancetta.”
“A proper ragù should be made with half pork, half beef,” says Anna no. 1.
“No, no! One-quarter pork and the rest beef.”
“More pork than beef—it has better flavor. I use one kilo of beef and one and a half of pork.”
“Pancetta. Always.”
“No! Not if you already have pork. That’s too much pork.”
“Can we all agree that skirt steak is the best?”
“No, no, no. In ragù alla bolognese there’s no place for skirt steak.”
“Piano piano.”
“Fresh tomato is better in the summer. If not, concentrato works.”
“Canned DOP tomatoes are more consistent.”
“When do you add milk?”
“I don’t use milk. Only with the ragù di prosciutto. It helps mellow the saltiness.”
“You know there are people who serve their ragù with spaghetti.”
“Spaghetti! Oh, please, no. Tagliatelle. Sempre tagliatelle!”
“Good ragù comes from someone’s house, not a restaurant.”
“Piano piano.”
As the debate rages across the table, I feel a sudden and overwhelming need to be one of their grandsons. Whatever food argument you’ve ever had with a friend or family member feels trivial by comparison; the differences at the heart of the discussion may sound minuscule, but it’s clear that they matter deeply to everyone in this room. I have zero doubt that the best ragù for me would be whichever one of their homes I happened to be eating in at the moment.
Despite the raised voices and the wild gesticulations, nobody here is wrong. The beauty of ragù is that it’s an idea as much as it is a recipe, a slow-simmered distillation of what means and circumstances have gifted you: If Zia Peppe’s ragù is made with nothing but pork scraps, that’s because her neighbor raises pigs. When Maria cooks her vegetables in a mix of oil and butter, it’s because her family comes from a long line of dairy farmers. When Nonna Anna slips a few laurel leaves into the pot, she plucks them from the tree outside her back door. There is no need for a decree from the Chamber of Commerce to tell these women what qualifies as the authentic ragù; what’s authentic is whatever is simmering under the lid.
Eventually the women agree to disagree and the rolling boil of the debate calms to a gentle simmer. Alessandro opens a few bottles of pignoletto he’s brought to make the peace. We drink and take photos and make small talk about tangential ragù issues such as the proper age of Parmesan and the troubled state of the prosciutto industry in the region.
On my way out, Anna no. 1 grabs me by the arm. She pulls me close and looks up into my eyes with an earnestness that drowns out the rest of the chatter in the room. “Forget about these arguments. Forget about the small details. Just remember that the most important ingredient for making ragù, the one thing you can never forget, is love.”
Lisetta overhears from across the room and quickly adds, “And pancetta!”