Best Food Writing 2015 (26 page)

Osteria al 15 is a beloved dinner den just inside the
centro storico
known for its sprawling plates of charcuterie, its crispy flatbreads puffed up in hot lard, and its classic beef-heavy ragu tossed with corkscrew pasta or spooned on top of béchamel and layered between sheets of lasagna. It's far from refined, but the bargain prices and the boisterous staff makes it all go down easy.

Trattoria Da Gianni, down a hairpin alleyway a few blocks from Piazza Maggiore, was once my lunch haunt in Bologna, by virtue of its position next door to my Italian school. I dream regularly of its
bollito
misto
, a heroic mix of braised brisket, capon, and tongue served with salsa verde, but the dish I'm looking for this time, a thick beef-and-pork joint with plenty of jammy tomato, is a solid middle-of-the-road ragu.

The best ragu I taste is a white ragu of rabbit folded between a dozen thin layers of lasagna, served at Pappagallo, a polished restaurant in the shadow of the two towers that climb from Bologna's center. It is a paradigm of sophistication and refinement next to the heavy-hitting classic versions, but with bunny as its base, it is not a ragu that could bear the name of this city.

Any of these dishes would qualify as the best plate of pasta in your town or my town or any town outside of Italy, but there's nothing that makes me want to change my return flight. Eventually, the Bologna ragus all begin to bleed together in a delicious but indiscernible pool of animal fat.

Alessandro has a simple explanation for my conundrum: “Bologna is not where you will find the best ragu. Too many tourists, too many students, not enough
nonne
. You must come with me to my town.”

Savigno is a lovely little village of 2,000 people nestled in a valley framed by rivers and oak trees and the gentle humpbacks of humble vineyards. Beyond being the capital of the region's white truffle industry, Savigno is also a major pillar in Emilia Romagna's ragu culture.

At Amerigo dal 1934, a restaurant famous throughout the region for its slow-simmered sauces and truffle-driven cuisine, Alberto Bettini and his family before him have spent the past 80 years refining the region's most famous dish.

“There are thousands of recipes for ragu,” Alberto says. “I can't tell you one is right and the other is wrong. This is Italy: if you go 5 kilometers from here, you'll find a completely different ragu.”

Nevertheless, a few axioms hold true across the spectrum of possibilities. Above all, Alberto espouses what could be the bedrock ethos of Italian cuisine. “The
materia prima
is the most important part. You can't make good ragu with bad ingredients.”

His ragu begins the same way all ragus begin: finely diced onion, carrot, and celery sautéed in olive oil. “It's important to really caramelize the vegetables. That's where the flavor comes from.”

Later comes two pounds of coarsely ground beef (“from the neck or shoulder—something with fat and flavor”) and a pound of ground
pork butt, browned separately from the vegetables, and deglazed with a cup of white wine (pignoletto, of course). Peeled tomatoes, tomato paste, bay leaves and three hours of simmering over a low flame. Seasoning? “Salt. Never pepper.”

In the dining room, after an array of truffle-showered starters, Amerigo serves us three ragus—a blind tasting of today's and yesterday's sauce, along with a jarred version he sells in upscale markets, so we can judge the effects of time and temperature on the final product. He doesn't serve the ragu on
tagliatelle
, though, but on little rounds of toasted bread—the better for us to appreciate the subtleties of the sauce, he says.

Alessandro and I both immediately choose the day-old ragu. It's not dramatically different, but the flavors are deeper, rounder, more harmonious. In both you taste the quality of the meat, the silken texture from the long simmer, the ghost of bay. It's a lovely creation, but there is perhaps too much tomato sweetness for a purist like Alessandro's taste. He's happy, but not euphoric—which is a state he hits a few times a day when he's eating and drinking well.

For Alessandro, we seem to be perpetually one or two steps away from the one true thing, constantly circling the simmering pot, as if the dozen ragus we eat together are all preludes to a more realized vision. “Come, my friend. I will show you how we do it at home.”

As we walk through Savigno, the copper light of dusk settling over the town's narrow streets, we stop anyone we can find to ask them for their ragu recipe. A retired policeman says he likes an all-pork sauce with a heavy hit of pancetta, the better for coating the pasta. A gelato maker explains that a touch of milk defuses the acidity of the tomato and ties the whole sauce together. Overhearing our kitchen talk below, an old woman in a navy cardigan pokes her head out of a second story window to offer her take on the matter: “I only use tomatoes from my garden—fresh when they're in season, preserved when it gets cold.”

Inspired by the Savigno citizenry, we buy meat from the butcher, vegetables and wine from a small stand in the town's plaza, and head to Alessandro's house to simmer up his version of ragu: two parts chopped skirt steak, one part ground pancetta, the sautéed vegetable trio, a splash of dry white wine, and a few whole canned San Marzano tomatoes.

“People talk about materia prima, materia prima, then they dump in a bunch of
doppio concentrato. Vaffanculo!
”

We leave the ragu to simmer and race off into the hills above Savigno to meet with Alessandro's truffle dealers (“the truffle season doesn't start until Tuesday, so don't tell them you're a journalist”). The sauce we return to, one that took all of 15 minutes of active preparation to create, is straightforward and beautifully balanced, an honest expression of the handful of ingredients we put into the pot.

It's clear that after years of dedicated pasta consumption across all corners of this region, Alessandro has learned a few things about ragu.

“We're getting closer,” he tells me.

The
tagliatelle al ragù
at Osteria Francescana in Modena stands six inches tall and costs $55. It also takes a battery of chefs and nearly 72 hours to make. Its height and price and layers of manipulation, at the very least, are befitting of a restaurant of Francescana's stature: it has three Michelin stars and is currently ranked number three in
Restaurant
magazine's list of the World's 50 Best Restaurants.

Massimo Bottura, Francescana's wild-eyed Captain Nemo, is no stranger to controversy when it comes to his treatment of the sacred pillars of Italian cuisine. When he first opened Ostería Francescana in 1995, Modenese grandmas were lining up to bash him with their rolling pins. One of his first enduring creations, a dish that morphed five different parmesan cheeses into five different textures (a 24-month pudding, a 50-month “air”), prompted the type of rabid public reactions you'd expect for a politician selling state secrets to the enemy.

More than any cuisine in the world, Italian food is built around an almost religious reverence for tradition: dishes pass from one generation to the next without as much as a grain of salt out of place. Part of that comes from the belief that Italian cuisine is already a fully realized vision, a museum-worthy collection of perfectly conceived dishes that can only be weakened by modern intervention. It's not untrue: Few people on this planet can do as much with five ingredients as the Italians.
Cacio e pepe
, pasta carbonara, pizza margherita: in their most honest iterations, they are near-perfect foods, deeply revered as expressions of the richness of Italian culture, and most God-fearing countrymen will be damned to watch a half-mad chef fuck with their formulations in search of his own stardom.

But Massimo—a man who finds culinary inspiration in Walt Whitman and Miles Davis—never saw it like that. Like the heavyweights of the post-modern cooking world—Ferran Adria in northern Spain, England's Heston Blumenthal—he sees food as a medium for man's greatest ambitions: experimentation, transformation, accelerated evolution. “We don't want to lose our history, but we don't want to lose ourselves in it either. That's why we are always asking ourselves questions about the best way to do things.”

The best way, according to Massimo, isn't always the traditional way, and that didn't sit well with certain people in this country, especially in conservative Modena. It wasn't until Massimo won over international critics and achieved global fame that he managed to convince locals. “Suddenly, they started to defend me.” (And for anybody that continued to doubt him, he won the gold medal for best balsamic vinegar in Modena, the most revered craft in one of the most tradition-driven cities in Italy—a barrel-aged middle finger to those who think he only knows how to manipulate.)

He's in the middle of recounting his vinegar triumph when an old man with a bike at his side peeks his head into the door to ask Massimo a question.
“Mi scusi, maestro! Maestro!”
The chef stands up from his desk and greets the man like a great don of the neighborhood. When he returns, he flashes a grin and raised eyebrows: “See that? Now they call me maestro!”

The master has strong opinions about everything, especially ragu. While the differences from restaurant to restaurant and grandma to grandma tend to be granular, especially to the outside eater, Massimo's two main pillars of ragu are nothing short of controversial in this highly charged world. First, he insists the meat shouldn't be ground, but rather cooked in large pieces, then shredded by hand. “99 percent of ragu starts with machine-ground meat. But why?” Instead, he insists that big pieces of braised meat give deeper flavor and better texture to the final dish.

The Second Law of Ragu according to Massimo is even more explosive: no tomato. “We never had tomatoes in Emilia Romagna, so how did they end up in the sauce? Tomato is used to cover up bad ingredients.”

In some dusty corner of the Emilian culinary history Massimo's
version may have its antecedent, but the ragu he fabricates is a severe departure from everything I've tasted so far. While the individual components of the dish constitute a showcase of the avant-garde technique and fuck-the-rules philosophy that characterizes so many of the world's most-lauded restaurants today, the final result tastes deeply, gloriously of ragu.

“Vision is the crossroad between the rational and the emotional,” says Massimo, in one of his frequent moments of existential reflection in the dining room. The rational mind says that hand-torn meat rich in gelatin will make a lusty, powerful sauce with no need for excess ingredients. Emotion tells him that it must still look and taste like home.

Later in the meal, the full extent of Massimo's whimsy-driven modernist vision will be on display—in a handheld head of baby lettuce whose tender leaves hide the concentrated tastes of a Caesar salad, a glazed rectangle of eel made to look as if it were swimming up the Po River, a handful of classics with ridiculous names like “Oops I Dropped My Lemon Pie”—but it's the ragu that moves me most. The noodles have a brilliant, enduring chew, and the sauce, rich with gelatin from the tougher cuts of meat, clings to them as if its life were at stake.

Most Italians would laugh at the price tag and blush at the modernist art-strewn room in which it is consumed—a poor replacement for their nonna's kitchen, they'd say—but with a twirl of a fork, the sculptures and the canvases and the credit card payments would disappear and all that would remain is a taste of childhood.

Time and nostalgia add intensity to the flavors of our earliest memories, and in many ways, the mission of modernist kitchens playing with sacred staples of home cooking is to find ways to make the reality live up to the impossibility of the memory. In the case of Massimo's ragu, that means making the noodles with a thousand egg yolks then cooking them in a concentrated parmesan broth. That means braising nothing but the richest cuts of meat at very low temperatures for very long times, then pulling them apart by hand to make a sauce of extraordinary depth and intensity. That means twisting the noodles into a tight spiral so that the pasta towers above the plate, the same way it does in the memories of those that eat it.

While I work my way down the tower to the bottom of the bowl, all
I can think about is that this is why so many of us fantasize about being Italian, because to be Italian means to have memories that taste of this plate of pasta.

At 5:30 pm in the village rec room of Savigno, a cabal of ragu-making grandmas has assembled at a long wooden table. Alessandro has convened an emergency council, calling on the time-tested
nonne
of this scenic town to hopefully bring a final bit of clarity to the murky issue of Emilia Romagna's slow-cooked sauce. He seems concerned that I still haven't fully understood ragu—that perhaps my mind has been clouded by the tourist-friendly osteria of Bologna and the Michelin-friendly pageantry of Modena. “Don't you worry,
amico
. If anyone knows something about making ragu, it is this group of
nonne
.”

It is a comic book cast of grandmother shapes and sizes: There's Lisetta, tall with a thick wave of black hair. Maria Pia, midsized and modest and crowned with a dark half-fro. Anna #1, short, plump, square-faced and generously jowled. And Anna #2, smallest in size, largest in stature among the old ladies, a woman who not only directed the famous pasta program at Amerigo 1934, but twice traveled to Tokyo to bring ragu to the people of Japan. “I walked into the subway and there I was, larger than life, making pasta on a Japanese billboard.
Madonna
!”

Anna's far-flung adventures notwithstanding, these are women born and raised in this fertile valley of golden grapes and hidden tubers. They have ragu in their soul.

I have a long list of questions that have been vibrating in my head over the past week—about the deployment of dairy, the browning of proteins, the ever-controversial issue of tomato. But ultimately, I manage only one feeble query—“how does everyone here make their ragu?”—before the council takes over and I'm rendered a silent spectator.