Recipe: Sauce Bolognese

The Italian cook and author, Marcella Hazan had an enormous influence on American cooking--bringing her Proustian memory of the great food back home to life in her recipes once she settled in New York. I think her most indelible contribution is the brilliant Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, published by Knopf in a sublimely beautiful green-jacketed edition as gorgeous as the meals inside. (The consistently amazing physical volumes produced by Alfred A. Knopf's crew ought to be the subject of its own blog post.) I got my copy from a couple of Foxes, but I have kept my Mom's meaningfully marked up edition, too.

My go-to Hazan recipe is Bolognese Meat Sauce:

1 T vegetable oil
3 T butter
1/2 C chopped onion
2/3 C chopped celery
2/3 C chopped carrot
3/4 lb ground beef chuck - get the butcher to grind a cut from the neck
Salt
Pepper
1 C whole milk
1/8 t nutmeg (shaved from a whole nutmeg)
1 C dry white wine (Sauvignon Blanc or Pino Grigio)
1 1/2 C Italian plum tomatoes with their juice; cut them first
Fresh grated parmigiano cheese

In a pot that retains heat, such as the excellent, blue Le Creuset pot I bought expressly for the purpose, add oil, butter, and onion on medium heat. When the onion is translucent, add the celery and carrot and cook 5 minutes more. Add ground beef  with salt  and light pepper (Hazan makes a point of adding salt when sauteing meat to extract the juices). Brown the chuck. Add the milk and simmer, stirring often, until it has bubbled away. Mix the nutmeg in. Add the wine and simmer until it, too, has evaporated. Only then add tomatoes and stir thoroughly. Cook at the lowest simmer your stove top can pull off for 3 hours or more--more is better. Taste and correct for salt prior to serving.

PS - I serve it over orecchiette because it is SO. DAMN. GOOD. Oh, and "Gun" by Emiliana Torrini is quite a smooth morsel, too--listen to it during that three-hour simmer-a-thon; now playing on iTunes.

Everything Old is New Again

When I was a teenager there were lots of changes going on. I needed glasses, braces, and new medical checkups. It took adjusting to. I felt socially conscious about some of these things in ways that I never had before. Were people looking at me? Was I ever going to get used to them? Did other kids have them, and which kids did? And, as I entered early adulthood, checkups began to include what one of my doctors called "the pause that does not refresh."

(And let me tell you, people were indeed looking. Not only were braces not yet cool, I was wearing headgear; that has never caught on. And rightfully so. I felt like Joan Cusack in Sixteen Candles. My dentists were flabbergasted by how quickly my teeth were moving. "Wear the headgear all day," they insisted. I did. To school. To Junior. High. School. My teeth flew past their desired alignment. Then back again all too quickly under readjustments. Finally, the head of the dentistry program--struggling to make sense of my anomalous data--opined that, just perhaps, the other kids were lying about wearing their headgear all day and my results could only be caused by actually doing so. They were shocked to learn of the mass deception. Clearly, no one had thought to visit any junior high school anywhere ever. I could have spared them their data analysis, time in gear had an inverse one-to-one relationship with my datability.)

Now that I am all growed up and playing on the back nine, I find that I am again adjusting to new glasses and am back in orthodonture. My hipster glasses--de rigueur chunky black plastic frames with a soupcon of purple--are really trifocals. Tri. Focals. It cost me a cool grand to ensure they don't have visible lines in the lenses. When I appear to be looking disdainfully down my nose at the menu choices, I am really just trying to find the optimal focal point under dim light to see the fine print on what the entree comes with. (I have a colleague who unabashedly asks me to hold the menu over on my side near the table candle so he can read it rather than suit up with magnified lenses.) I have a new invisalign retainer to counteract the ravages of orthodontic time by shifting my lower teeth back into the nice, straight smile position all that commitment to headgear had achieved. And the checkups now include colonoscopy prep, which involves a pretty grim night of waterboarding oneself like a masochistic Jack Bauer.

A time of change marked by new glasses, braces, and medical needs. I am keeping an eye out for acne just in case.

PS - Everything old is new again. See how I wove that in? Maybe I should close this story with "The End," the way I did when I was 13. Oh, and since the kids are all about the new hit, "Watch Me" by Silentó you oldsters should get hip to it, too; now playing on iTunes.