a quirky sense of ostentation

the fallout from a monday night dinner for two:

late that night, standing on the sidewalk drinking a glass of wine with a friend before we attempted to move a cooler full of pork belly and ice that might've weighed more than two hundred pounds to the second floor of a building, my friend told me, while he dipped a baguette in the bolognese i'd pulled off the stove an hour before, that the italian in me really shined through that bolognese.

there's not a single drop of italian blood in my veins.

this guy is a chef, which means he knows what can be said to really get to a person's soul when tasting their food. and for an italian, which he admittedly thought i was, is anything more important to the soul than a ragù, which my bolognese was a version of? so maybe it was premeditated flattery, but it worked, and given how italians feel about bolognese, it worked really well.

this post, for all its meaty worth, will be on the making of that dish, which was the first time i'd ever come close to cooking anything like it. it was a process that began months ago, and it was only the spontaneity of alicia asking if i'd make a bolognese for dinner, and my assuming that she wanted that bastardized impostor of ground beef and tomatoes that the olive garden calls a bolognese, that the thing finally came to fruition. i'd learned too much from dante. i'd read a book that even went into detail about bolognese. i had to do the thing right. so when, at five 0'clock, she asked when dinner would be ready, i guiltily lied to her when i said maybe sometime around seven. no way was i taking the easy way out.

and for the sake of trying something different, and having a bit of fun, i'm going to pair excerpts from bill buford's memoir heat throughout this post, because like me, working in an italian restaurant—with a chef who'd caked his fingernails thick with the foodstuff of true italian soil on italian soil—changed his entire perspective on food. and his naïveté, another thing we share, is abundantly apparent when he first talks about that hodge-podge of a native dish to bologna in italy, the bolognese.

"fundamentally," he says, "a ragù is an equation involving a solid (meat) and a liquid (broth or wine), plus a slow heat, until you reach a result that is neither solid nor liquid. the most famous ragù is a bolognese, although there is not one bolognese but many."

"an italian ragù and a french ragout are more or less the same thing. in any language, the process involves taking a piece of meat and, as it was described to me in the vernacular of the kitchen, cooking the shit out of the fucker."

hence, exhibit a):

to the right is the product of a visit to olivia's across the street. i came home with over a half pound of half-inch cut pancetta, a half pound of skirt steak, and a half pound of pork chop. i cut the steak a bit finer than the pork, since it's a fairly lean cut of beef and is best when cooked fast, or like in buford's learned kitchen vernacular, cooked the shit out of, which was obviously the direction i was heading. the small bits react better to the slow heat, and the larger bits of pork render better when browned with fast heat, which is the first step. and cutting the meat when raw makes the job that much easier.

but the surprise to the whole thing was in the bowl to the left.

a lot of my time in the recent days has been spent uploading content to the yet-to-be launched face lift of stephanieizard.com, not to mention knocking out the little nagging things that kept popping up for her second wandering goat dinner, which is why i've lagged on posting content on my own site. it's taken a lot of work. but, that work has its benefits, which were reaped monday night when steph found out i was gonna cook a bolognese for dinner. while talking to her she'd literally taken two hotel pans of pork belly from the oven, from which she'd pulled fiber-by-tender-and-barely-hanging-on-fiber of braised beef short ribs. it'd be perfect for it, she said of my ragù.

like i was gonna turn that offer down.

so in went the raw meat and boom, just like that, the thing was on. it sizzled and snapped and several minutes later, after scooping the rendered result from the pan, i was left with the brown and flavor seducing remnants of the drippings, or that word that's become so forbidden to say, fat. when it comes to fat, to each their own. my dad would probably spoon it all out and hit the pan with oil all over again, because that's just the way he likes to do it. for me, i want the fat. fat, always always always, equates to flavor. so i kept the drippings, though rather than roast my vegetables in a pool of the stuff, i spooned a good amount from the pan and poured it over my meat while it rested—this makes the meat happy. in then went a diced onion and a couple diced carrots, and lots of salt and pepper. my dilemma, at this point, was whether or not to throw in more.

this, in a nutshell, is the beauty of a bolognese. i bought a few seranno peppers from olivia's, toying with the idea of adding a punch of heat to the ragù, and if i'd used them, though my bolognese would have been far different than your mother's grandma's or your best friend's father's grandma's, it still would have worked. take a look at what buford says about it:

"a bolognese is made with a medieval kitchen's quirky sense of ostentation and flavorings. there are at least two meats (beef and pork, although local variations can insist on veal instead of beef, prosciutto instead of pork, and sometimes prosciutto, pancetta, sausage, and pork, not to mention capon, turkey, or chicken livers) and three liquids (milk, wine, and broth), and either tomatoes (if your family recipe is modern) or no tomatoes (if the family recipe is older than columbus), plus nutmeg, sometimes cinnamon, and whatever else your great-grandmother said was essential."

so, i toyed with serranos. but that's as far as it went. they never saw my knife, and are sitting still on the butcher block in the kitchen. i stayed away from nutmeg and cinnamon as well—though when next time rolls around, for sure the autumn spices will flavor my meats. so too did i avoid a classic mirepoix, opting to leave the celery out, and running instead with only garlic in addition to the onion and carrots. i wanted this sauce to be about the meat as much as possible, hankered down not by the texture and distraction of my sloppy and pathetic dice of the crunchy, sweetly-hydrated vegetable best known for something called ants on a log.

and consider this as to why i'd fear a thing like that:

"gianni speaks of the erotics of a new ragù as it cooks, filling the house with its perfume, a promise of an appetite that will mount until it's satisfied. actually, what he said was the cooking of a fresh ragù mi da libidine—gives him a hard-on—and until he can eat some he walks around in a condition of high arousal."

a ragù is something like a mexican mole, the sauce a thing of layers. each step along the way a new layer is added, and then so too another, and sometimes a previous layer is then manipulated by the addition of another layer, until the end result is this complex thing, something like "a crumbly stickiness, a condition of being neither liquid nor solid, more dry than wet, a dressing more than a sauce..."

so celery omitted, and the meat back once again in the pot, i hit the mixture with my favorite part. the tomatoes. for me, it's the san marzanos that heighten the sense of arousal for the ragù. when their fiery sugars begin to wrap around the melted fats and oils in the pot, and the first spat of heat explodes from the molten juice in a boiling pop, it's like the atomic release of the big bang and a whole new universe has been born from the seeds of the italian tomato.

which i realize is over the top and pathetically ridiculous, but still is altogether familiar to the italian's admitted state of arousal when a ragù is doing it's thing.

from this point on though, the thing took care of itself. other than dicing the short rib meat—which she cooked i think in pineapple juice and asian flavors, lending a hand to the italian/orient tradition of marco polo—to a super fine grain-like consistency and tossing that in and pouring in some red wine and later on adding some torn basil leaves, i just reduced the heat to a simmer and covered the pot with the lid. piece of cake. so much so that i did more work for the website and even hopped across the street with alicia to grab a drink with a couple friends, all while the slow heat did its business, and the ragù methodically took its form.

then, just after ten o'clock, it was done.

at il casale, dante served his bolognese over tagliatelle, and in it was everything from veal to pork to beef to pancetta, and even chicken livers and mortadella. this meek version, over paperdelle, was mine.

with a glass of red wine and a baguette we broke piece by piece over our plates, we had our dinner. and was it good? i thought so, but then again i'm german-irish and some trace of every other western european country, with absolutely no italian lines in my family tree. so when someone says, the italian in you really shines through in this, it can go both ways...