h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

First, find a large heavy sauce-pan with a decent base. Then find a chopping board and a good knife.

Ingredients, for four to six people, depending on how saucy you like your pasta. You can double everything - I do, frequently, as it freezes just dandily:

- 500g (1 lb) of beef mince. The traditional Bologna recipe is half pork mince, half beef mince, and a goodly dollop of chicken liver, and is also gloriously rich, but banned from the Agapanthus household as S regards liver as an abomination like unto the lowliest swamp mud. In any case, this is the southern Tuscany recipe. Where was I? Oh yes, beef mince. I tend to use organic mince, or at least mince from a slow-growing, hormone-free sort of cow. Also, I don't bother with the lean mince, as it gets terribly dry and gritty in the long cooking, and isn't very tasty by the end of it all. Save lean mince for burgers.
- two medium onions, finely diced.
- two mediumish carrots, finely diced. Me, I loathe the texture and sweetness of cooked carrot so much I grate them on a fine grater, so that they vanish politely and merely enrich the flavour.
- two sticks of celery, also finely diced.
- two, three, four or even five or six cloves of garlic, depending on how much you like garlic and how ferocious said garlic is, finely chopped or crushed.
- two bay leaves
- thyme, dried, one heaped teaspoon, or fresh, half a dozen sprigs or so.
- one quarter of a nutmeg, grated
- tomatoes - either two cans of preferably plum tomatoes, but, frankly, most types will do really, or a large bottle of passata, or if you are using your own, basically a pint of tomato slurry or chopped mess once you've removed skins and seeds. As a little girl, I spent many many boring hours peeling, chopping, simmering, and sieving tomatoes. I offer you my heart-felt condolences if this is what you will now be doing. I shall put a method for preparing passata from scratch at the bottom of the recipe*
- olive oil and butter. The butter is not mandatory, but is traditional.
- a glass of dry white wine. Yes, white. Like I said, this is not Bologna.

Method:

Heat a tablespoon of oil and one of butter in the heavy pan. Throw in the celery and onion, and saute until the onions are going golden. Then add the carrot and saute for a few minutes more - the oil/ butter will go richly yellow.

Turn the heat up a little to medium. Now add the mince. Stir and bash and prod away at it to break up the lumps as finely as you can bear - I hate lumps, but then I am a little weird about food texture (we've rather established this with the carrot thing, haven't we?). A lot of people quite like the sauce to have 'texture' and don't strain their wrists so much. Cook until the mince is JUST starting to burn and stick - just, mind you. If you're using a non-stick pan, well, look for the mince getting really brown on the edges. It should start to smell rich and umami-ish, rather than steak-like. This takes twenty minutes or so, says S. I haven't the faintest, I just carry on until it looks and smells right.

Now throw in the glass of wine, and stir everything around. The mince should 'relax', and look less bitty.

Now put in the tomato. Stir it in, and add enough water (usually half a pint or so) to make sure all the solids are completely submerged and it's all a bit soupy.

Add the garlic, the bay leaves, and the thyme. Stir thoroughly, and poke the bay leaves under the surface.

Now turn the heat right down as low as it will go, and put the lid almost on, so a little steam can escape.

Wander back into the kitchen every twenty minutes or so to stir, and check it isn't boiling dry or sticking. Add more water if it starts to look dried out BEFORE you get to at least two hours' simmering time. Glorious rich jammy sticky crusts of tomatoeyness will form around the edges of the pan, to be scraped off and stirred back in.

At last, it should be a rich deep orange-red, and a good thick porridgy texture. Add the grated nutmeg. Fish out the bay leaves and the thyme twigs, if applicable. If it is lumpy, or, at least, lumpier than you like, a quick splurk with a hand-held blender is good. If you like lumps, please ignore me. Many people do. Like lumps, that is. And ignore me.

Stir into freshly cooked pasta, and sprinkle with grated parmesan or pecorino romano, and black pepper.


*Passata, the way I was forced to make it: - Bring a pan of water to the boil. Take each tomato, puncture it with a knife to stop it bursting, and drop it in the boiling water. Fish them out after about thirty seconds and allow to cool - the skins should now come off easily. If you are preparing merely enough tomato for the sauce, you can now cut the tomatoes into quarters and scoop the seeds out (seeds taste vile and infuriate people with dentures); then finely chop the tomatoes, and proceed with recipe. Or, if you are in a major tomato processing mood, cut up and simmer the tomatoes in a STAINLESS STEEL pan - this is muy importante - until they collapse a bit. Then press the sludge through a sieve with a metal spoon. Then bottle the sludge - passata! We used to freeze bags and bags and bags of it. And the skin on your hands may peel a little. Tomatoes are very acidic. Sorry.

This looks lovely, Ag!

You and my hubby and lumps... R. can't stand lumps, and will fiddle with browning hamburger meat (which I will use instead of mince) until it has the texture of coffee grounds. I like little lumps in mine.

I'm with you on the carrots, however. Grating them is a good idea, and it also sneaks hidden protein into what's basically a delicious, high-calorie dish.

> Like lumps, that is. And ignore me.

I'd like to say that I hand copied this down onto 3x5 recipe cards, but that would be a lie. Truthfully, I cut and paste it into a Word document, duly saved in the Recipe folder as Tomato Sauce a la Agapanthus.

Brava!

Brilliant. Ag, your prose is truly the most lumpless I have ever read. I wish every recipe was written like that.

hi Agapanthus! your ragu sounds absolutely scrumptious!

>>Now throw in the glass of wine, and stir everything around. <<

um but at what stage do you extricate the wineglass?

Extricate the wineglass. Very good. Throw in the wine that was in the glass but keep a careful hold of said glass and put IT in the sink instead.

I usually add the wine straight from the bottle in a 'hmmm, that looks like a glasses-worth' way...

...which on tough days after one of these arrrrgggghh weeks at work may well risk being followed by me (at least contemplating) taking a hearty swig of the white wine straight from the bottle. "Might as well take it straight from the Mother Animal" as my Dad, bless him, used to say

And I very much agree with d'E's comments about recipes oughting (!) to be written like that Will forward to Mrs SG V for general inspiration and reading pleasure.

*Adds a variation*

'Ragu Mama Rosa'

(Sig. S.'s mother is Rosa(lija))

1/2 kg minced beef (and Ag has reason, not lean). It is possible to use pork or lamb if you have nothing else or are in the mood for experiments.

4-6 sticks of celery or a 1/4 of the root/knob.

(A sidestep. I was unsure what the celery root was called, found the latin word at put it through a search - and the first hundred entries shown was in German with a few Danish thrown in. Usually the first and the most results are in English. Germans and Danes must thrive on celery roots ))

3-4 carrots (depending on size)

2-4 onions

A lot of garlic (see Ag's recipe)

Sage, origanum majorana (I don't have a dictionary here)

Olive oil

Tomato concentrate (a very strong paste in tins, glasses or tubes)

Water

Salt, pepper

-------
Sig. S.'s additions: green bell pepper in small stick and/or green olives with piment, chopped. Also he (and I) experiment with the herbs and spices: Rosemary, thyme, basilicum - maybe a nip of cayenne etc. - red wine
------

Mama Rosa begins in the morning. The morning after Sig. S.'s 40th birthday I was woken by this curious riiitch-riiitch sound. She began and begins grating celery and carrots very early whether the ragu is for lunch or supper.

Alas, we grate both celery and carrots as finely as possible.

A cup or two of olive oil is heated and the grated celery and carrots simmer ind the oil with a teaspoon of dried sage and 1-2 spoonfulls of dried majorana (I cannot say what the equivalent is with fresh herbs - sage is very dominant though).

The finely chopped onioins and garlic are added. And when the onions are tranparent the mince goes in. See Ag's description for unlumping the ragu. When the meat, finely divided, is grey-brown, water to cover is added.

If you have additional vegetables like green bell pepper and green olives they get in now to simmer under lid with the rest.

The concoction simmers for at least two hours - and needs to be stirred and watched for not getting dry and burnt.

If you begin in the morning and need the ragu for supper, you can turn off the heat and let the ingredients work their magic (like in a casserole).

At the same time when you begin to boil (plenty of) water for the pasta, you put the heat back on under the ragu, add salt, pepper, oregano or whatever spice/herb you need. Add redwine (or white) if you want to use wine and add tomato concentrate little by little untill the ragu has the right taste, look and texture. The concentrate thickens the ragu.

Not much different from Ag's recipe - just a variation.

Buon appetito

. ...swigs on wine bottle.. ..



. ...swigs again.. .. . and makes list for grocers tomorrow.. .. .

Ag, what size cans of tomatoes do you use? I want to get my proportions right.

Never mind, just ignore me. I see we are shooting for a pint of slurry in relation to the other ingredients.

Mama Rosa's ragu looks good too.