Can anyone play?
I have a recipe, or maybe it’s more of a heuristic that moves in a foodish direction.
I found a recipe for a kind of pasta sauce I’ve never made before, called Bolognese. It’s from northern Italy and it doesn’t have the same spices as southern Italian pasta sauces, just salt, pepper, garlic, bay leaf, and a pinch of nutmeg.
4-6 ounces bacon, minced, and it’s much easier to chop it up when it’s partially frozen. Fry bacon. To bacon add one large yellow onion, peeled and minced, plus one entire bulb of garlic, also peeled and minced, this is usually 10-12 individual cloves. Add a little olive oil if the bacon did not produce enough fat to brown the onion and garlic. When onion begins to caramelize, add about one pound beef liver, minced finely (best done while the liver is partially frozen) and about two pounds ground beef. Break up the ground meat, mix thoroughly, and brown.
While all of that is browning, get two cups of chicken stock, or if you don’t have chicken stock, boil two cups of water with two chicken bouillon cubes until they dissolve. Add two cups milk to the stock mixture and heat through. Whisk in one tablespoon each salt, pepper, and garlic powder, a pinch of nutmeg, and a bay leaf, and take off the heat.
To the stock mixture whisk in two 18 ounce cans of tomato paste–or, if you can only get the little cans, around 36 ounces total. Whisk the tomato paste into the stock mixture until until smoothly incorporated. Add tomato mixture to meat and onion mixture. Mix thoroughly and bring to a simmer. Place in oven, covered, at 250 F. for 4-6 hours to simmer it without scorching.
Serve over pappardele pasta if available, for which egg noodles are a good match if you can’t find pappardele in your local supermarket. A bit of grated Parmesan or asiago cheese is a good topping. Traditionally this dish is accompanied with a dry red wine, of which Tuscany produces many, many varieties.
Note that there are a vast number of variations and family recipes. Heavy cream instead of milk. Ground pork instead of ground beef, or mixed with it. Chicken liver instead of beef liver. Finely minced beef heart instead of hamburger if you can get it. Keep in mind that it’s not real Bolognese without organ meats.
One thing that is common is that, like the man says, Sauce Bolognese is an exercise in restraint. It’s Tuscan and influenced by Mediterranean French cuisine. The oregano and basil and mushrooms that mark Sicilian cooking and marinara sauce aren’t present. It isn’t made with a Sicilian style soffrito that has bell peppers and celery. You can add these in but then it’s not Bolognese any more.
Tuscan cuisine is austere and simple. Compare and contrast a Tuscan style dessert food, like bomboloni–simple sweet fried donut holes, basically–to elaborate Sicilian desserts like cannoli, with their rich sweetened ricotta cheese filling and chocolate chips. This is not good or bad, but it is the nature of Tuscan dishes, where simple is beautiful and less is more.