Ragù alla Bolognese

FLAVOR, IN ITALIAN DISHES, builds up from the bottom. This is the first truth of ragù alla Bolognese, and Americans who dump canned tomatoes over browned hamburger will never understand it. The soffritto comes first. Then the meat, crumbled and browned until every trace of raw pink has vanished. Then the milk, which must be completely absorbed before you even think about adding wine. Only then, at the very end, do the tomatoes enter. They are guests in this sauce, not hosts.

The Accademia Italiana della Cucina registered an official recipe with the Bologna Chamber of Commerce in 1982. This was not an act of bureaucratic meddling. It was self-defense. By that time, the world had so thoroughly corrupted this sauce that Bolognese grandmothers could no longer recognize their own creation on foreign plates. What Americans call 'Bolognese' bears the same relationship to true ragù that a postcard bears to the Sistine Chapel.

There is no garlic in this sauce. If this shocks you, it proves my point about the unbalanced use of garlic being the single greatest cause of failure in would-be Italian cooking. There is very little tomato. The color should be the warm terracotta of clay pots, not the aggressive red of marinara. The texture should cling and coat, not pool and puddle. Simple does not mean easy. This sauce takes four hours. There are no shortcuts worth taking.