by Simon Schama
In 1973, the National Theatre put on a production of the Neapolitan playwright Eduardo de Filippo’s Saturday, Sunday, Monday, in which a family falls apart along with the meat sauce. A character played by Laurence Olivier was at the centre of it all, but the real star was the ragù: actually cooked onstage, filling the theatre with the narcotic aroma of sizzling onion, garlic, tomatoes and meat. The acting was terrific, but who cared? Audiences applauded and rushed out to the nearest trattoria – only to be disappointed by a garish, thin, red concoction.
You don’t want that, but what do you want; or rather whose ragù or meat sauce? It’s a subject that can start fights among partisans. I’ve borrowed this and that from hostile parties and over many years of experiment developed a version that brings you a bowlful of Italian splendour in icy times.
First, and most essentially, you need time. Bolognese sauce isn’t fast food. If you’re assuming you can get home late, fry up some minced beef, bung a can of tomato purée on it, let it sit for ten minutes and cook the spag, you might as well go to the sub-standard local Italian after all. Think of the real bolognese as a party of shy ingredients who need careful introducing to each other if they’re going to get happily intimate. You will need forty minutes to an hour to get everything going and at least another hour for the sauce to develop its gorgeousness. If you have a whole afternoon, better still, or if you can cook a big batch and leave it to combine and develop (preferably not in the fridge) overnight, so much the better.
Other than time, here’s what you must have: three different kinds of meat: veal, beef and, in some form or other (minced loin, or sausage or pancetta), a bit of a pig. Some classic recipes insist on hamminess as in pancetta, but it depends on whether you want that cured quality or not. It’s certainly not as essential as the mashed chicken livers which, in a true bolognese sauce (such as Elizabeth David’s on page 323), are really obligatory: they give the dark substance and pungency you’re after. If you have liver-haters in the house, don’t tell them; they won’t notice.
The procedure – which also calls for the cook to drink something happy-making, say a Morellino de Scansano – is always the same. Sauté your odori: onion, garlic, parsley, finely chopped carrot (quite a lot of that), celery (ditto). Then remove them to a bowl while you’re browning the meats; drain some (not all) of the fat; return the meat; add chopped peeled tomatoes and a tablespoon of purée; salt, pepper, oregano, a smidgin of thyme, ditto basil. Sauté the chicken livers separately until just the brown side of pink, mash them up and add to the pot. Then add beef or chicken stock. Bring to a simmer.
Now the second Big Decision faces you – the wine: red or white? Both are actually fine, but they make for a different style of sauce. The red can be aggressive, which works if you are on a two-day bolognese, as it will have time to be fully absorbed by the other ingredients; but, if you’re going to be eating it the same evening, use white and let it just help the meat melt.
About half an hour before serving, grate a little Parmesan cheese into the sauce and let it blend – irrespective of whether you’re going to sprinkle more on the final dish.
Last trick – don’t drown the spag in the sauce. The oily grains should hang on the pasta rather than smother it.
And cook enough to freeze a load. You will be grateful on those long, dark winter nights. Or mornings. I’ve had it for breakfast and, believe me, it will change your whole day. Sometimes I’ve even spooned it down cold. So sue me.
Or try one of these classics:
Marcella Hazan’s version
Serves 4–6
1 tbsp vegetable oil
4 tbsp butter
½ cup chopped onion
⅔ cup chopped celery
⅔ cup chopped carrot
¾ lb ground beef chuck
salt
fresh ground black pepper
1 cup whole milk
whole nutmeg
cup dry white wine
1½ cups canned Italian plum tomatoes, torn into pieces, with juice
1¼–1½ lb pasta (preferably spaghetti), cooked and drained
freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese at the table
Put the oil, three tablespoons of butter and the chopped onion in a heavy 3.3-litre (6-pint) pot and turn the heat to medium. Cook and stir the onion until it has become translucent, then add the chopped celery and carrot. Cook for about two minutes, stirring the vegetables to coat well.
Add the ground beef, a large pinch of salt and a few grindings of pepper. Crumble the meat with a fork, stir well and cook until the beef has lost its raw, red colour.
Add the milk and let simmer gently, stirring frequently, until it has bubbled away completely. Add a tiny grating, about an eighth of a teaspoon, of fresh nutmeg and stir.
Add the wine and let it simmer until it has evaporated. Add the tomatoes and stir thoroughly to coat all the ingredients well. When the tomatoes begin to bubble, turn the heat down so that the sauce cooks at the laziest of simmers, with just an intermittent bubble breaking through the surface. Cook, uncovered, for three hours or more, stirring from time to time. While the sauce is cooking, you are likely to find that it will begin to dry out and the fat will separate from the meat. To keep it from sticking, add half a cup of water as necessary. At the end of cooking, however, the water should be completely evaporated and the fat should separate from the sauce. Taste and correct for salt.
Add the remaining tablespoon of butter to the hot pasta and toss with the sauce. Serve with freshly grated Parmesan on the side.
Elizabeth David’s version
Serves 6
85g uncooked bacon or ham (both fat and lean)
butter
1 onion
1 carrot
1 small piece of celery
225g lean minced beef
115g chicken livers
3 tsp concentrated tomato purée
1 glass white wine
salt and pepper
nutmeg
2 wine glasses meat stock or water
½ a tsp nutmeg, freshly grated if possible
Cut the bacon or ham into very small pieces and brown them gently in a small saucepan in about 15g of butter. Add the onion, the carrot and the celery, all finely chopped. When they have browned, put in the raw minced beef, and then turn it over and over so that it all browns evenly. Add the chopped chicken livers, and after two or three minutes the tomato purée, and then the white wine. Season with salt (taking into account the relative saltiness of the ham or bacon), pepper and a scraping of nutmeg, and add the meat stock or water.
Cover the pan and simmer the sauce very gently for thirty to forty minutes. Some cooks in Bologna add a cupful of cream or milk to the sauce, which makes it smoother. I add a light sprinkle of nutmeg. Another traditional variation is the addition of the ovarine or unlaid eggs which are found inside the hen, especially in the spring when the hens are laying. They are added at the same time as the chicken livers and form small golden globules when the sauce is finished. When the ragù is to be served with spaghetti or tagliatelle, mix it with the hot pasta in a heated dish so that the pasta is thoroughly impregnated with the sauce, and add a generous piece of butter before serving. Hand the grated cheese round separately.
Cheese Soufflé
Guardian, 2 March 2009
In 1958, when I was thirteen years old, the days of the midweek seemed to melt aimlessly into each other. Saturday night couldn’t come fast enough: winkle-pickers, drainpipe trousers, hanging around Golders Green bus station eyeing the birds and doing a bit of back-combing. But I didn’t need a diary to tell me how far away the weekend was. The evening aromas coming from the kitchen as I struggled with my Latin verbs would check off the days.
Wednesday brought a pungent sheepy smell emanating from the greyish lamb and barley soup my mother optimistically called Taste of the Garden of Eden. Expel me, please. Haddock in the air? That would be Thursday. Eaten cold, two days later, for breakfast, it wasn’t all that bad.
When the fried flakes started to glow with a slight morning iridescence, the thing turned edible. The faintest whiff of roasting garlic? That would be what my sister and I uncharitably dubbed Friday Night Memorial Chicken; a venerable object smeared on the breasts with a dab of Marmite meant to cheer the bird up as it emerged defeated from the oven. Rattling inside the little cavity was that one solitary clove of garlic: the exotic knobble that my mother conceded as a romantic touch amid the iron regimen of her unvarying weekly routine.
So when I learned to cook in the 1960s, the discovery of food was always about experiment: an aversion to routine of any kind. There were certain trusty books at hand; my guides and mentors – Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking and Italian Food, and Simonne Beck, Louise Bertholle and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And I quickly learned that there were some things I did better than others – bouillabaisse, soupe au pistou, stufato di manzo (Italian beef stew) – but I shunned anything resembling a familiar repertoire: a bistro edition of my mother’s kitchen. So I would recklessly take chances with dinner parties on dishes I had never tried before. Sometimes they worked; sometimes they didn’t.
Zwiebel, an Alsatian onion tart from Elizabeth David, had exactly the buttery-golden texture and voluptuous ooze running to the walls of the pastry shell, but a beef Wellington served up to impress historians was a glutinous ruin. Undaunted, the riskier the combo of pastry and whatever it was, the more I was up for it. It took a few disasters with a classic Russian salmon koulibiak, but on the third try at a summer dinner party in my neo-brutalist Cambridge don’s rooms, I pulled it off, passed the vodka and watched as conversation stopped and guests forked their way to quiet joy.
Years later, with small children running round my American kitchen, cooking was still ordained as adventure. Living in New England, the family was going to eat seafood – and I didn’t mean fish fingers. In late February, the very first tiny, intensely sweet shrimp of the season would be driven down from Camden, Maine, by a ruddy-faced fisherman who would park his van on a suburban hill, pack a huge plastic tub of them for a few dollars, and we would gorge through the weekend, sucking the meat from the delicate shells. Then there was lobster, the scariest imaginable food for children, which we educationally set before them. We cracked a claw open for my four-year-old daughter, who was leaning towards the glistening oily white flesh when a cry of horror came from my smaller son sitting in his high chair. ‘No, Chloë! Don’t put it in your mouth,’ he wailed, staring in horror at the lurid marine cockroach. She did.
But, even as I turned into an unstoppably crazed gazeteer of world cuisine – Maghrebi maqluba (upside-down aubergine and rice casserole), Burmese beya kwaw (split-pea fritters) that fell apart in the pan – I knew it was unfair to recruit my kids as fellow gastro-explorers in the name of principled eclecticism. Small children are nature’s little conservatives. They are warmed by fulfilled expectations. They have favourites in the kitchen – and why deny them? So I developed some dishes that could satisfy my longing for complicated exercises in flavour fusions, but still be food that the children loved: a lemony-chickpea chicken stew first encountered in Claudia Roden’s Middle Eastern books, and the much-requested raan, a Kashmiri roast lamb dish in which the joint is marinaded in three separate coats: a garlic-and-roast-spice rub; a paste of saffron, crushed pistachio and almonds blended with yoghurt; and finally, a sumptuous drizzle of honey. After two (or preferably three) days tight-wrapped in film in the fridge, out it comes and slow-roasts (or rather disintegrates beneath its nutty-spicy-sweet golden mantle of flavours) and you have something that’s both main course and pudding all at once.
Raan was all very well for the weekend (marinade Friday night; eat on Sunday), but the more hectic family life became, the more I needed a range of dishes that would make them happy as they smelled the cooking when they came in from lacrosse or science lab on a bleak muddy evening in February, or while they got stuck into homework. They had to be dishes that wouldn’t take an age to prepare (though dinner was usually around eight, two hours after most American kids had eaten, allowing their friends to stop round for a second supper). And it had to be a meal I wanted to shop for, after a day’s teaching or writing.
Getting to know the shopkeepers makes a difference, turns a transaction into a gossip with friends. At the Korean greengrocer I want to know when the New Jersey asparagus might show up in May, but also how Monica is doing off in Montana with her one-year-old. At the butcher’s in Chappaqua, they’ll find me a rabbit for a pasta sauce, but I worry how Tony manages after losing his wife in a battle with cancer. At Harold’s place they’ll be smoking sturgeon and whitefish and complaining it’s been too long since they saw me, while across the street at Mount Kisco Seafood I’ll talk cricket with Pauly from India, but baseball with Brian and Joe even though they’re Yankees fans and I’m a diehard Red Sox loyalist. We switch to Pink Floyd or politics and they tell me the Copper River salmon from Alaska is in – and only for a precious two weeks. So I’ll take a long beautiful fillet and power-roast it in the oven with a light crust of fine-chopped fresh herbs.
The trick is to set the roasting pan, liberally greased with butter (olive oil, if you must) and a layer of herbs, in a fierce oven, say 225°C, until the green stuff is on the turn of crisping. Then you set the fish on top, skin-side up, for just four minutes for a piece about 1.5cm thick, until the skin peels off with just the touch of a knife. Turn, season and cover the now exposed side of the fillet with more herbs (parsley, coriander, thyme, even tarragon – just not rosemary) and roast for another four. The fish cooks perfectly, buttery and golden-crispy on the outside, perfectly juicy inside. Kids of all ages, even fish-haters, love it.
So the herby salmon became an item in the repertoire I swore I would never have. But actually family cooks need these staples; together they make a kitchen portrait of their table life together. And with any luck, as they grow up and leave home and start their own kitchens, the children will take those food memories with them. There is an Italian meatloaf – polpettone – that I made a lot, which, before he became a vegetarian, my son liked so much that he wrote his college application essay about father–son bonding in the hunt for the perfect meatloaf recipe, ending with the triumph of the polpettone rustica. It’s a homely, lovely thing; a coarse blend of veal and beef, into which you knead some chopped-up stale white bread, soaked in milk, a few grams of finely grated Parmesan, a beaten egg and that’s about it. But then instead of packing it into a loaf tin, you make a freeform Swiss roll or big sausage of it, roll it in flour and carefully set it in a casserole of foaming butter or oil together with a couple of sprigs of thyme, a bay leaf and a sage leaf. You let the roll bubble and brown a little, add a glass of white wine or (better for some reason) dry vermouth and then put it in a 180°C oven with the lid off. After thirty minutes take the pot out, and carefully turn it over with spatulas (wooden are best, as non-flexible) and let it cook another thirty to forty minutes. Serve with some sauté potatoes and a salsa verde and you can guarantee supper bliss.
There are other indispensable items in the Schama repertoire: a wonderful simple dish of flattened chicken fillets dredged in paprika and cayenne cornmeal, fried and set on a bed of rocket that has been doused in chopped summer tomatoes, their juice marrying with some good olive oil and a little sherry vinegar, the whole thing crispy and sloppy, hot and fresh, all at the same time. Then there are swordfish steaks marinaded in an Asian blend of soy, mirin, grated ginger, garlic and chopped spring onions, and barbecued for seven minutes a side.
But what the kids moaned for, craved, especially in dark winter months, was the simplest of all: a cheese soufflé. Simple? Yes, it could hardly be simpler, and also virtually infallible as long as you have a dependable oven. The prep takes perhaps twenty minutes; the cooking, filling the kitchen with luscious, toasty-cheesy aroma, another twenty-five to thirty minutes, during which time you can make a salad or a pan of spinach to cut against the voluptuous ooziness of
the soufflé. So the whole thing takes maybe forty-five minutes – a doddle for hard-pressed cooks in midweek. And though soufflé cooking scares people off – what if it fails to rise? (it never does) – the only art you have to learn is the difference between mixing and folding the cheese-yolk mixture into the beaten whites.
Once you’ve tried it, you’ll know there’s nothing to it and, unless you’re a cholesterol timebomb, it will be at the heart of your very own family repertoire too.
Cheese soufflé
Serves 4
6 eggs, separated into 4 yolks and 6 whites
2 tbsp butter plus tsp for greasing soufflé dish
1½ tbsp plain flour, plus dusting for the soufflé dish
200ml milk
170g grated Gruyère
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tsp salt
50g finely grated Parmesan
For accompaniment
Either watercress salad with walnuts and a drizzle of balsamic dressing, or shredded cavolo nero crisped in the oven for 10 minutes with 3 tbsp olive oil
Pre-heat the oven to 190°C. Butter a large (1.8l) ovenproof soufflé dish and dust with flour.
Separate the eggs: whites into a large bowl, yolks into small one.
On a medium-high heat, melt the butter in a large saucepan; add the flour and blend with either a wooden fork or a small whisk, stirring all the time for two minutes, so that the mix doesn’t form lumps. It should make an elastic goop.
Add the milk and continue to stir or whisk for about four minutes until the mixture forms a dense creamy mass – the béchamel.
Add the grated Gruyère and stir until smooth. Remove from the heat. When tepid, whisk in the egg yolks, mustard and salt.
