Il Sugo

The other day I was asked how I would make meat sauce—what restaurants call ragù, and what is known in Tuscany simply as “sugo.”

Like most Tuscan recipes, the list of ingredients is limited and intuitive, and the process is foolproof, if not necessarily short. And like many Tuscan recipes, it starts with a “battutina”—a mix of chopped parsley, onion, celery, garlic, carrot and “rigatino,” the Tuscan word for pancetta or unsmoked bacon. Otherwise known as the “odori,” these bulbs, roots and fat, along with sage, rosemary and occasionally fennel, are practically the only herbs and spices used in Tuscan cooking, apart from generous doses of salt and pepper. One lets the battutina “imbiondire” (“go blond”), or as we would say, brown in the pan, in olive oil, of course, before adding the ground meat–half beef, half pork–and letting that go blond too. Then one adds the tomato and, pay attention here, a tube of tomato paste–the secret to a rich and savory sauce.  Now for the long part: it should simmer for around four hours and needs a little broth (chicken) whenever it gets too dry.

“Pastasciutta,” a word Italians use interchangeably with the word pasta itself, comes from southern Italy, and filled pastas like tortellini from Emilia Romagna, so there is no typical pasta shape that the Tuscans serve with meat sauce. Any and all will do. For an important occasion, or to spoil your family, serve it on tagliatelle (egg pasta is considered elegant), mixing the noodles and the sauce thoroughly in the pasta pot, with a lump of melting butter to bring out the taste of the meat. As a Florentine friend of mine, long a US resident, reminded me, the Italians “use little actual sauce—and it tastes so much better.” And for heaven’s sake do not offer cheese: Tuscans never gild the lily.

The smell of a pot of sugo simmering on the stove wafts out of village windows any weekday morning. Mamma or more likely Nonna is working up a batch, which she will divide into small aluminum containers (no, we do not have Ziploc yet) to freeze. In the winter, if she is unfortunate enough to have a husband who hunts, she will have spent three days soaking a gristly cut of boar in vinegar, and a few hours after that boiling off its “selvaggio” or “wild” taste in pan after pan of water, before starting to make from it…sauce.

Now, what to serve for secondo…