Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

Maybe twenty years ago, I learned Delia Smith's Ragu Bolognese. By that time, I'd been making a red sauce with meat for pasta for about fifteen years.

Ragu Bolognese is referenced as a touchstone in "Shut Up And Eat: A Foodie Repents" in the most recent New Yorker, and I've come to recognize it as one of the standard referents of modern food (Roast Chicken would be another), which can be done at a basic level but which have a whole set of little details which apply to doing it really well.

Consider onions and browning meat. In a naive version of a recipe, you put the pan on the heat, throw in onions and garlic, cook for a bit, throw in the meat, brown, and add additional items. A quick google shows up lots of recipes with this order and level of detail.

There are a few problems with that, though. Onions will burn and not soften at the temperatures needed for browning meat; garlic is even less tolerant of high heat than onion is; meat browns best with a minimum of water (which will be extruded by the cooking onions); if you do get the temperature high enough to brown the meat then there will be a residue which sticks to the pan which can burn on during subsequent cooking.

You can't rush onions; you get them harsh-tasting and burned around the edges (this applies also to caramelizing them, which is another topic entirely).

An experienced cook turns this into the following steps:

1) Add an oil that will not burn to a heavy pot (heavy is important, because of step 4 below). Peanut oil is good if there are no allergies among the consumers(smoke point is 231 Celsius), or corn oil (236 Celsius); canola oil will do (smoke point is 204 Celsius); virgin (not extra-virgin: virgin olive oil has a smoke point of 215 Celsius as opposed to extra-virgin's 190 Celsius) olive oil. You could use clarified butter (250 Celsius) but that would not be traditional for this dish.

(If you have a dish that does not involve browning meat, but only softening onions, ordinary butter has more flavour, and many French recipes will call for it, but it's not suitable for high heat cooking, with a smoke point of only 150 Celsius. On the other hand, butter is wonderful for cooking an omelette because of its low smoke point: if you keep your eyes on it you can tell exactly the point at which to put the eggs in the pan by the point at which the solids begin to darken.)

2) Put the pot on high heat and add minced beef (for some Bolognese recipes, this would also include minced pork or veal and sometimes chicken livers). Brown the meat in the fat with the lid off -- you want to minimize water build-up -- and remove from the pot.

You will ideally brown the meat in batches, because of the water given off by the meat. Even with meat from a butcher's the moisture in the meat will come out as water and needs to be cooked off; with meat from a supermarket it may have been plumped up with water and take longer. Either way, browning the meat in small batches speeds up the browning process, although you can also just burn off the water from the meat as a whole. This may take some time -- one online recipe that uses this latter approach estimates half to three-quarters of an hour for four pounds of meat.

3) Reduce the heat of the pot to low, and add chopped onions. Soften, with the lid on, for ten minutes. Add garlic towards the end of the process.

With a full Bolognese recipe you will cook pancetta or bacon with the onions; bacon is cooked at a lower temperature than browning.

You may choose to add celery and carrots as well as onions to provide a flavour base from a mirepoix. This is certainly what I would to for a full-out Bolognese.

4) Remove the lid and add a liquid to deglaze / loosen the brown bits from the meat, turning the heat up. This is traditionally white wine. Leave the lid off, and let the alcohol in the wine burn off. If you used a thin pot, adding the cooler liquid can stress the metal, which is why a heavy pot is appropriate.

5) Re-add the browned meat to the pot and continue with the rest of the recipe.

Now, it's worth noting that what I've just described is different from the fairly elaborate Delia Smith recipe -- she softens the onions and then adds the pancetta, cooks at a low heat, removes the onions, pancetta, and garlic to a casserole, and then browns the beef. However, she's doing the main cooking in a different pot from the softening / browning (she cooks the sauce slowly in a 140 Celsius oven).

After this point, recipes diverge sharply -- some call for tomatoes and broth, some for tomato paste and milk, for example -- except in calling for three hours cooking. Most rely on cooking on a stovetop and in some of those cases on regularly checking and topping up the broth / milk. (Milk is traditional with a true Bolognese.) All the recipes agree on cooking for three hours.

For tomatoes, San Marzano tomatoes do make a difference. It's also worth noting that except at the end of the summer tinned tomatoes are almost invariably better than fresh ones. Also, fresh tomatoes are usually pretty poor examples of the type these days, unless you get heritage tomato varieties, and heritage tomatoes are frequently varietals which are meant for eating raw rather than cooking. So you would normally want tinned San Marzano tomatoes.

This whole process takes about four hours in total. If you cook on a stovetop you have to keep checking the liquid level, as well, so it's not like baking with large gaps in the middle. The only pasta sauce I know that takes the same time is a Genovese (not the pesto-and-green-beans sauce, the pot-roast-and-onion one).

By contrast, the basic meat-and-tomatoes sauce, takes under an hour (an example is this recipe from Martha Stewart). On the other hand, many Bolognese recipes are designed to make a large quantity which can be frozen -- but you still need to find the time (effectively on a weekend or a day off, unless you're a night owl) to make it in the first place.