Bolognese sauce
Bolognese sauce (ragù alla bolognese in Italian), also known as "Bolognaise sauce", is a meat-based pasta sauce originating in Bologna, Italy. Authentic ragù bolognese is typically made by browning finely minced meat with soffritto (in this case garlic and mirepoix – carrots, onions, celery) and other aromatics, then adding small amounts of tomato sauce, stock and simmering for a long time (often upward of four hours), so that the meat softens and begins to break down into the liquid medium. As a short cut, one can use ground meat instead of minced, but the texture is not as good and often the meat is not lean enough, leading to greasy sauce. Recipes differ greatly from a very classic and time-taking ragù alla bolognese to a much more practical sugo di carne (meat sauce).
The original sauce is not made with minced meat; instead, whole meat, usually beef or veal, is chopped very finely with a knife. Different kinds of meat like pork or chopped chicken or goose livers may also be used along with beef and/or veal for variety. To have a richer content than a regular ragù, pancetta, prosciutto, mortadella, and porcini are often added to the soffritto. Before the tomato sauce is added, white wine is poured into casserole and evaporated. Cream or milk is addeed about fifteen to ten minutes before the cooking process is completed. Ragù bolognese is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a "tomato" sauce, but authentic recipes have only a very small amount of tomato – maybe a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste.
Spaghetti alla Bolognese, or spaghetti bolognese which is sometimes further shortened to spag bol, is a dish invented outside of Italy consisting of spaghetti with a meat sauce. In Italy, this sauce is generally not served with spaghetti because the pieces of meat tend to fall off the pasta and stay on the plate. Instead, the people of Bologna traditionally serve their famous meat sauce with tagliatelle (tagliatelle alla bolognese). Outside the traditional use, this sauce can be served with tubular pasta or represent the stuffing for lasagna or cannelloni.
Spaghetti bolognese is very popular in Sweden, where it is a common wish among kids to have spaghetti och köttfärssås (Spaghetti and ground meat sauce) for dinner. Therefore, in the last decades it has become an important part of the Swedish cuisine. The dish is also popular in the United Kingdom, where it has a reputation of being the only dish that students are able to cook when they leave home for university. In the United States, the term bolognese is often mis-applied to a tomato-and-ground-beef sauce that bears little resemblance to real ragù bolognese.
References
Kaspar, Lynne Rossetto (1st Edition: September 21, 1992) The Splendid Table: Recipes from Emilia-Romagna, the Heartland of Northern Italian Food, Morrow Cookbooks. ISBN 0688089631