Dish · italian
Bolognese
A slow-cooked sauce of ground beef and pork, soffritto, tomato, and a little milk or wine, tossed with tagliatelle rather than spaghetti. It coats the pasta in a thick layer and tastes more of meat than tomato.
Where it comes from
Bologna's chamber of commerce filed an official recipe for ragu alla bolognese in 1982 to settle a version that had drifted for decades. Cookbooks from the region were already describing a similar long-braised meat sauce over a century earlier, built on cheap cuts and vegetables cooked down slowly.
What cooks argue about
The main fight is over tomato: little or none in the oldest versions, against the tomato-forward sauce most people outside Italy call bolognese. A second argument is milk versus wine for deglazing.
Nobody has published a bolognese recipe yet. The page stays out of search until one exists, which is the rule for every thin page here.