bolognese sauce

How to Win Friends and Influence a Bolognese Recipe

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BologneseDouble
Late last week, David Brooks wrote a column in the New York Times pointing out that network-television comedies have changed during the past two decades from being centered on families (“All in the Family,” “The Cosby Show,” “Different Strokes”) to revolving around loose sets of friends (“Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “30 Rock”).

Brooks picked up this observation from an essay by Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times that goes into much greater detail, but basically TV is different now because the middle-aged television audience is different.

In most households, both parents work and yet, they spend more time with their children than parents did a generation ago. What falls to the wayside is friendship. There are more television shows about friends not because we all have more friends in our lives, but because we have fewer.

As it turned out, we had plans to have a friend and her three-year-old over for dinner (she’s been on her own with him for a few days, while his father is out of town on a business trip) on Saturaday night, and for the past few weeks I’ve been trying to make a big pot of Bolognese sauce. It’s something I just need to have in the house, and I can’t really relax unless I know there’s some on hand. It freezes well, and can always be relied upon to fill a hole in a weekly menu on short notice. I had all the ingredients on hand to make it, and having people over for dinner provided just the impetus I needed to make a batch. A very big batch. I thought, “why not invite a few other people over?”

So I started to make some calls. First to friends who live so close that they can peer into our apartment, from across the antiquated clothes line towers, but who we don’t often get to see. Then to another friend with a kid whose husband was away. Then I had to stop. Santa Maria was starting to lose her patience (she objects when I plan big parties, then always enjoys them). Besides, we only have seven chairs.

I’m so practiced at making Bolognese that I can make it in my sleep. Saturday, however, I was presented with a small challenge. I like to make the sauce with chicken stock, but I was out of it. Intent on making big batch of the sauce, to have extra for the freezer, I needed to find another liquid to replace the stock.  I had two pounds of beef, five 28 oz cans of peeled plum tomatoes, and plenty of wine, but I wanted to stretch the sauce.

Classic Bolognese recipes call for making it with milk. I’ve always shied away from that because I like my sauce lean. Marcella Hazan insists that it makes the meat tender, and I thought, now’s my chance to see if she’s right. I don’t know if the meat was more or less tender than usual, but I do know that my friends were pleased, and I was overjoyed to see them.

Double Sized, Double Rich Bolognese Recipe

  • 1 onion, diced
  • 4 carrots, diced
  • 1 stalk celery, diced
  • 4 slices bacon, diced
  • 2lbs ground beef
  • 1 cup whole milk
  • 1 cup white wine
  • Five 28-ounce cans peeled plum tomatoes, diced
  • cinnamon and nutmeg, to taste

        Sautee the onion, carrots, celery and bacon until the onion is translucent and the bacon fat is rendered.

        Add the ground beef and cook and break with a fork or other kitchen instrument until all the pink is cooked out of the beef. Salt the beef.

        Add the milk and some nutmeg and cook until it is boiled off.

        Add the wine and repeat.

        Add the tomatoes and simmer for three or more hours.

        Season with more nutmeg and some cinnamon.

 

        Note: When making it in this large a quantity, I use two pots.

The Many Ways to Make a Bolognese Recipe

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My brother Tom and his wife, Liza, recently brought into this world their first child, a beautiful little boy, Luca. Last week, I took one look at him swaddled on their Brooklyn couch and said to myself, “Yes, I’m ready to be a grandparent.” Then I thought about what advice I might give my brother.

When I first became a parent, I learned that there are at dozens of different ways to do any child-related task, from breast-versus-bottle feeding, to plastic-versus-glass bottles, to milk-versus-soy-based formula to co-sleeping, attachment parenting, and Ferberizing. What I took away from the surfeit of opinions was that there was no right way to do anything. No right way, therefore, no wrong way. I was in business as a father.

I considered how I could sum this up to him. I concluded that the easiest thing to tell him is that there are as many ways to make a Bolognese as there are to parent.

In his book about learning how to cook Italian food, “Heat,” Bill Buford enumerates a few of the variations: “A Bolognese is made with a medieval kitchen’s quirky sense of ostentation and flavorings. There are at least two meats (beef and pork, although local variations can insist on veal instead of beef, prosciutto instead of pork, and sometimes prosciutto, pancetta, sausage, and pork, not to mention capon, turkey, or chicken livers) and three liquids (milk, wine, and broth), and either tomatoes (if your family is modern) or no tomatoes (if the family recipe is older than Columbus), plus nutmeg, sometimes cinnamon, and whatever else your great-great-great-grandmother said was essential”

Most Americans I know have little knowledge of what their great-great-great grandmothers might have cooked (or what she might have thought was essential when it came to child rearing). My brother and I are no exception. In a great-grandparent’s place, we have authorities like Marcella Hazan and Mark Bittman.

Hazan’s “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” outlines her requirements for a good Bolognese:

  •     The meat should not be from too lean a cut; the more marbled it is, the sweeter the ragù will be. The most desirable cut of beef is the neck portion of the chuck.
  •     Add salt immediately when sautéing the meat to extract its juices for the subsequent benefit of the sauce.
  •     Cook the meat in milk before adding wine and tomatoes to protect it from the acidic bite of the latter.

She goes on, but I won’t. I adapted my recipe from Potato masher

Recently, however, she has cut back on her consumption of the sauce. It could be that her tastes have changed, or might just be the fickleness of a four-year-old. Either way, I wanted to get her eating it again, so I made a slight adjustment to my method.  I realized that my meat was clumping (perhaps a consequence of skipping the milk step?), and I remedied that by crushing the cooked ground beef with a potato masher. I wasn’t sure if the more finely pulverized beef made a bigger difference than fact that I told her that I’d made it special for her, but Nina loved my latest version of it.

One note on the sauce: It may take hours to cook (during which period your house will smell heavenly), but it freezes extremely well and, if packed in quart or smaller container, defrosts on a low heat in the brief amount of time it takes to boil water and make pasta, making it a perfect alternative to a weeknight take-out dinner. Plus, it will taste much better than anything that comes out of a steaming cardboard box.

Bolognese Meat Sauce (the Park Slope Way)

  •  1 onion, chopped
  • 2-3 carrots, chopped
  • 1 stalk of celery, chopped
  • 2 slices of bacon, chopped
  • 1 cup chicken stock
  • 1/2 cup white (or red) wine
  • 11/2 lb ground beef
  • 3 cans of peeled plum tomatoes, diced to bits with an immersion blender
  • Cinnamon and nutmeg to taste

 

Saute the onion, carrot, celery, and bacon until the vegetables are soft and the bacon fat rendered.

Add the beef and cook it until it is brown.

Add the wine and cook it off.

Add  the stock.

Add the tomatoes and the spices and simmer until thick (about three hours).