Slow food, before slow food was invented
Italian pasta is almost unthinkable without ragù – and ragù is patience. Hours of slow simmering of beef, pork, wine, tomatoes and soffritto, until the flavours dissolve into one another. Traditionally, ragù was started on Sunday mornings before mass and simmered until the midday meal afterwards.
Bologna honours ragù alla bolognese, Naples devotes itself to ragù napoletano with whole pieces of meat, and southern Italy cooks it with lamb. Ragù is always somewhere else, always at home, always at grandmother’s, always on a Sunday – a wonderful kind of cooking.