Bolognese sauce

Tagliatelle with bolognese sauce.

Ragù alla bolognese, or Bolognese sauce (in French sauce bolognaise) is a meat-based sauce for pasta. The sauce came from Bologna, Italy. Bolognese sauce is sometimes taken to be a tomato sauce but authentic recipes have only a small amount of tomato.

The people of Bologna traditionally serve their famous ragù with freshly made tagliatelle (tagliatelle alla bolognese) and their traditionally green lasagne. Less traditionally, the sauce is served with maccheroni or other durum wheat short pasta.

In 1982, the Bolognese delegation of Accademia Italiana della Cucina said that the recipe may only contain beef, pancetta, onions, carrots, celery, tomato paste, meat broth, red wine, and (optionally) milk or cream. There are different recipes, some traditional ones also contain chopped pork or pork sausage. For special occasions, chicken or goose liver, along with veal. Today, both butter and olive oil are used for cooking the Soffritto of small amounts of celery, carrot and onion. When they are available, Prosciutto, mortadella, or porcini fresh mushrooms may be added as well. Milk may be used, especially when starting to cook the meat. This will make the taste better. It is not unsual to cook the Ragù for a long time, 5 to 6 hours are common.

Spaghetti alla Bolognese

Spaghetti alla Bolognese.

Spaghetti alla Bolognese, Spaghetti Bolognese, or Spaghetti Bolognaise in a form popular outside of Italy, consists of a meat sauce served on a bed of spaghetti with a good sprinkling of grated Parmigiano cheese. Although Spaghetti alla Bolognese are very popular outside of Italy, it never existed in Bologna, where ragù is served always with the local egg pastas tagliatelle or lasagne. Spaghetti is a durum wheat pasta from Naples, and the Naples Ragù of a meat flavoured thick tomato sauce clings much better to slippery spaghetti than Bologna's ground beef ragù.

In recent decades, the dish has become very popular in Sweden and Denmark as spagetti och köttfärssås, in Swedish, and spaghetti og kødsovs in Danish, especially among children. It is also popular in the United Kingdom (where it is colloquially abbreviated to spag bol or spag bog) and has become a staple of the British dinner table. In the United States as well, the term 'bolognese' is often applied to a tomato-and-ground-beef sauce that bears little resemblance to ragù served in Bologna.

Chinese people often use the term "Western zhajiang mian" to refer to spaghetti bolognese, alluding to its superficial similarities with the traditional Chinese noodle dish of zhajiang mian as both are dry noodles covered with a thick ragù mainly made of minced meat. This provides an interesting symmetrical perspective to Westerners referring to zhajiang mian as "Chinese spaghetti".

References and further reading

• Kaspar, Lynne Rossetto (1st Edition: September 21, 1992) The Splendid Table: Recipes from Emilia-Romagna, the Heartland of Northern Italian Food, Morrow Cookbooks. ISBN 0-688-08963-1.