Thursday, September 17, 2015

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.

2 comments:

E-Lizzie said...

yum

E-Lizzie said...
This comment has been removed by the author.