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Italian culture is inseparable from its food. When you think if Italy, you think of its cuisine, of pizza, gelato and most of all, pasta. Especially pasta with ragù.
The ragù bolognese, a thick, rich, meaty sauce made from beef and tomatoes, is probably Italy’s single most important cultural signifier. Ragù represents the very essence of the country’s food, and of its culture, and yet try to find one definitive recipe for ragù. You can’t. There are as many conflicting recipes for ragù as there are families in Italy, although every Italian will tell you that theirs is the real way to cook it.
In Italy, every family has their own ragù and it is passed down from generation to generation, it becomes part of their culinary heritage. That handwritten recipe, greasy and well-thumbed, passed from nonna to mamma to daughter, becomes something almost magical. A centuries-old legacy, an intimate tradition scripted by hand and passed on. We learn our national history at school or university, but we learn our family history at home, in the kitchen watching nonna, or around the table on a Sunday, which in Italy is a religion.
Alessia Brogna comes from Le Marche. She lives in London, but her appreciation for Italian culinary tradition is strong. She set up The Nonna Collective - a group that honours the contribution of the nonna to Italian society - as a way of recognising the food and culinary traditions that Italy’s grandmothers are the custodians of.
“It is a must for every family in Italy, to meet up with the family for lunch every Sunday,” she says. “I set up the Nonna Collective, which is all about the knowledge and traditions brought to us and the community by the grandmothers. The nonna is the one who cooks for you on a Sunday and then the mother picks it up. And this is where all the family traditions are formed and get passed on.”
Few western nationalities have a reverence for older people like Italians. It truly is exemplary, how the oldest people are kept close to the heart of Italian society. It is their relationship with their grandparents that defines Italians, and it is in the kitchen and around the table that values are transferred and passed on.
While there is a general consensus around what makes a good pizza or carbonara, the ragù is divisive. Ask Italians what the perfect ragù is and you’ll get a different answer every time. It encapsulates their family’s cultural identity and they will fight to defend it.
In a way it represents much of the national psyche of Italy. Modern Italy is only 160 years old, prior to unification it was a collection of different feudal kingdoms and culturally diverse regions. The Italian language, derived from the Tuscan dialect, was imposed as a unifier, replacing the regional dialects over the course of a few generations. Even today, you’ll find pockets of the older generation who only speak dialect. Modern Italy is a construct, and Italians’ loyalty is first to the family, the basic nucleus of society. It explains a lot about how the nation is managed.
This is evident in the food culture - different regions proudly pronounce their regional cuisine to be superior, and within that subset, their own family’s is best.
“There is a lot of pride in your own family’s recipe for ragù and also a lot of judgment of other’s recipes,” says Alessia. “We love to judge the others in Italy”.
“In Napoli they say ‘ogni scarrafone è bello a mamma soja’, which means every cockroach is beautiful to his own mother. In Italy, always, whatever you do in your family is best. Often, people don’t even like the ragù that much, but the recipe stays in the family.”
If there is one ragù to rule them all though, you have to go to Bologna to find it. The rich agricultural land of Emilia-Romagna gave birth to a regional cuisine that can claim to be the best in Italy, and a ragù that has travelled the world as ‘spaghetti Bolognese’.
Here in the historical city, trattoria Amerigo1934 has a reputation as serving the best ragù in the city. Alberto Bettini is the chef patron, and his recipe came from his grandfather. He has dedicated his life to perfecting it, but not by tweaking the recipe itself, instead seeking the best raw ingredients which were not available in the past.
“Ragù is one of the symbolic dishes of Bolognese cuisine. For us the ragù with tagliatelle, or indeed, any kind of ragù, has to be realised with ingredients that come directly from our area. Ragù cannot be made with meat that is bought at wholesale and comes from another country. The beef cannot come from South America, the pork cannot come from Ukraine or Poland. We cannot make ragù with tomatoes from China or fake Italian olive oil from Greece, Turkey or Tunisia.”
“We have come to realise that ragù can only be made with locally-produced raw materials. This is absolutely the most important thing about ragù.
"The recipe arrived from my nonno, who opened the trattoria in 1934, but we have adjusted it according to the higher-quality raw ingredients that we have found, which are better than what they used 90 years ago."
So, the preparation of ragù begins with the sourcing of the ingredients, the planning. It’s not something you can just whip up at the last minute. Typically, if you’re planning on cooing ragù for a Sunday lunch, you might start planning it early in the week. Then the actual cooking takes time.
“The other important component for ragù is time,” says Bettini. It depends on the type of meat you are using but four and a half hours to five and a half hours. You can only understand a ragù by tasting, when it is done it is done.
“The real ragù Bolognese is made with tomatoes, but we use fewer tomatoes than you see people using around the world. It is a meat ragù, with tomato, not a tomato ragù with meat. This is a mistake.
“The other mistake is that people buy their ingredients in the supermarket. Never, ever start your ragù in the supermarket. You should talk to your butchers, you should source your vegetables at the farmer’s market.
“There are thousands of recipes, all depending on what meat you are using. It was created as a recipe to use whatever meat was in the house. Historically we hear about the recipe with the meat of adult cow and pancetta, we use cuts from the rump or the neck, piece that have more fat.”
Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and in a highly localised past, people cooked with what was at hand. That’s how the ragù came to be. It is ironic that as we live in a modern world of infinite choice, that element of inventiveness is discarded in favour of tradition. For Italians, food is associated with family and memories, so it becomes purely emotional and there is no room for the disruption of innovation.
Indeed there is perhaps no point in trying to find the perfect ragù. There is no definitive answer as to what is correct or not. The white ragù is no more authentic, even if it predates the existence of tomatoes on Italian shores during the Renaissance.
Italy was once the centre of the world, the most globally outward-looking country, which linked east and west. But despite the misconception that Italy looks inward when it comes to food, the global influences are hidden in plain sight – spaghetti and ravioli from China, and tomato from the Americas. These elements have, over time, become assimilated into Italian cuisine. It can be easy to forget that.
The key ingredient in the recipe, and in the cultural evolution of ragù, is time. Just as the ingredients break down and transform in the pot over hours, so too has its cultural meaning transformed over the centuries. It’s a dense and complex layering of histories and flavours, and to try and deconstruct may well be impossible, no more than you can uncook a ragù.
The only ragù is the one you make at home. It is a completely subjective thing. Maybe that’s the meaning of this most famous of Italian sauces, and why it has travelled so widely. It’s a recipe that morphs and adapts to exactly the environment it finds itself in, while somehow maintaining its identity.
Is there anything more Italian than that?
