Macaroni, Bologna Style

History

Ragu alla bolognese - the slow-cooked meat sauce of Bologna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy - is one of the most famous preparations in Italian cooking, and Artusi's 1891 'Maccheroni alla bolognese' is one of its earliest printed codifications for the home cook. What surprises modern readers is how different it is from today's tomato-rich sauce: Artusi's version has no tomato at all. It is built the northern way, on butter rather than oil, with a fine soffritto of carnesecca (cured pork belly) minced together with onion, carrot, and celery, then lean veal browned and simmered with only a little broth and a scant pinch of flour - a rich but essentially white sauce, dressed at table with Parmesan and, if you like, a finish of cream. Food historians note that tomato was not yet part of the dish and that the shift toward the tomato-forward ragu of tagliatelle came only later, around the turn of the twentieth century and after. The much-quoted 'official' recipe - which does include tomato - is a far more recent act of codification: it was deposited by the Bologna delegation of the Accademia Italiana della Cucina with the Bologna Chamber of Commerce in 1982 (and updated in 2023), and should not be read back onto Artusi's nineteenth-century original. Artusi himself notes only that Bologna favored medium 'denti di cavallo' macaroni for the dish; his book does not claim to have invented the sauce, and framing him as its single 'first' recipe is best hedged - he stands among its earliest recorders, not necessarily its origin.

Ingredients

• g lean veal
• g carnesecca (cured pork belly)
• g butter
• onion
• carrot
• stalks white celery
• flour
• broth
• salt
• pepper
• nutmeg
• macaroni
• parmesan
• dried mushrooms, truffle, or chicken liver
• glass cream

Instructions

1. Dice the veal small and finely chop the carnesecca, onion, carrot and celery.
2. Put everything on the heat with the butter; once the meat colors, add a scant pinch of flour and moisten with broth, cooking until done.
3. Optionally enrich the sauce with dried mushrooms, sliced truffle, a diced cooked chicken liver, or half a glass of cream.
4. Dress the drained macaroni with parmesan and the sauce; serve moist, bathed in a little sauce, not dry.