Italy, oh, Italy. I think it is safe to say that most of us, certainly those who are living in Europe, have got some sweet memories of the country famous for its pizza, pasta and Roman remnants. A country where, at least as a tourist, everything seems easy. La vita è bella. For me, my first trip to Italy came quite late. I was seventeen, had just finished high school and together with my two sisters we decided to visit Naples, then Florence. And even though the trip mostly focused on visiting Pompeii and every museum possible, I can still remember the sweet taste of the true Italian food.
My most vivid food-related memory of that week is not the most obvious one. As we were on a budget, we were staying in a hostel a couple of kilometers from the center of Florence. The place in itself was not particularly pleasing and neither were the surroundings, at first glance. In my mind, I had put together a very clear image of what an Italian town should look like and this certainly wasn’t it. But like the outskirts of every city, its charm was just a little more hidden. Here, there were no ancient temples, no splendid churches, no world-famous museums. All you could see were apartment blocks, busy roads and a neglected football court.
1. Desperate times
But one evening, we were hungry. We had made the mistake of leaving the city center before we had eaten and it very much looked like we were going to regret that until the next morning. There was no kitchen present in the hostel and we very much preferred to spend the money we had on something else than a cab drive to the city. Of course, we could have walked, but we would not have made it in time. A little desperate we started to look for a restaurant near the hostel on Google Maps, which turned out to be a challenge in itself due to the poor WiFi signal – let me remind you, there was a time during which mobile data came at a rather expensive cost. But BOOM, there you had it: a restaurant, with positive reviews, only a couple of hundreds of meters away.
2. Restaurant unnkown
As much as I would like to share the address with you, I cannot. I have looked and looked but sadly I totally forgot where we were staying and what the restaurant was called. But let me tell you, it did not look like a place you would typically visit as a tourist. The room was filled with regulars, which was made painfully clear when everybody looked at us, the three Belgians, when we walked in. After a bit of awkward semi-Italian, semi-French mumbling, we got a table and a menu. No English translation – which, nowadays, I would consider as a good sign but which seemed like quite the challenge then. I decided to take a guess and go for the ‘Ragù alla Bolognese’, Bologna being rather close. And as it turns out, I was about to discover my favorite dish of all times.
3. The best dish I ever had
When ordering that dish, I was expecting to get a plate of over-cooked pasta with a typically Belgian bolognaise sauce. The kind of thing you can order in each and every restaurant, which rarely tastes very badly but which is never super tasty either. Yet instead of that, I got a dish so intricate and refined that every bite was like a little Godsend. The finely cut beef was literally melting in my mouth and the rest of the sauce was a tasty mystery to me. Little did I know, it would take a long time before I would be able to taste this again.
4. Looking for a book
Fast-forward to a couple of years later. In the meantime, I had been to Italy quite a few times but I had never been able to find a ragù that good anymore. After a bit of research, I discovered that there was a cookbook a lot of Italians swore by. It was called ‘Le ricette regionali Italiane’, written by Anna Gosetti della Salda and it counted about 1200 pages. In short, the book is divided into separate chapters, all covering the traditional cuisine of a specific region in Italy. And apparently, that was the book I would need in order to recreate the dish I so much longed for. I went on a quest and visited about ten bookshops before I found the damn thing. Of course, an English translation did not exist – any translators out there? – so in Italian it would be. When I came home, the first thing I did was to try to figure out the recipe, which took me quite some time. But once I made it, I could not be happier: I found the recipe and yes, it was possible to make such a splendid dish at home.
Of course, it would be cruel to go on about a dish for so long and then not to share the recipe with you. If, this winter, you are in desperate need of some comfort food, this is the only dish you need. Of course, it helps a lot for the taste if you choose your ingredients wisely. Opt for quality rather than quantity but do not be too sparse because you will want to have a second plate.
5. Ingredients
- 300 grams of minced meat (preferably a mixture of veal and beef)
- 100 grams of pancetta
- 60 grams of butter
- 1 onions
- 3 carrots
- 3 celery stalks
- 10 centiliters of red wine
- 1 tablespoon of tomato concentrate
- 20 centiliters of beef stock
- Milk
- Pepper and salt
6. Instructions
- Start by cutting up the onions, carrots, celery and pancetta. The smaller the pieces, the better.
- Let the butter melt in a big cooking pot over medium heat.
- Once it has melted, add the minced meat. Lightly fry the meat before adding the pancetta and vegetables. Let fry for a couple of minutes.
- Pour the red wine into the pot and let it all simmer until the wine has almost completely evaporated.
- Now add 10 centiliters of the stock and let it evaporate again, then repeat this a second time.
- Once the stock has disappeared, pour enough milk over the sauce in order for it all to be covered. Also incorporate the tomato concentrate, some pepper and salt.
- Your sauce is ready once it has thickened enough to really call it a sauce. The longer you let it all simmer, the better your ragù will taste, so do not be hasty!
