Tagliatelle made from egg pasta, eight millimetres wide, rolled out by hand, dressed with a ragù of minced beef and pancetta, a soffritto of carrot, celery and onion, tomato paste, wine, milk and broth, cooked for hours over low heat: never with spaghetti, never with cream, non-negotiable rules for anyone born in Bologna.
The word «ragù» comes from the French ragoût. The first written source of a meat sauce used to dress pasta is a late-eighteenth-century manuscript by Alberto Alvisi, cook to Cardinal Barnaba Chiaramonti; in 1891 Pellegrino Artusi published a ragù recipe with no tomato, using veal fillet, pancetta, butter and vegetables.
To fix a tradition that had kept changing over the centuries, in October 1982 the Bologna delegation of the Accademia Italiana della Cucina deposited the official recipe for ragù alla bolognese at the Chamber of Commerce: a notarial act to guarantee, as the text puts it, the continuity of Bolognese gastronomic tradition around the world.
