Meat Sauce
Chop up some ham fat with a little onion, celery, carrot, and parsley. Add a small piece of beef and cook until beef is well colored. Then add one and one-half tablespoons of red wine (or white), cook until wine is absorbed, then add one tablespoon of tomato paste diluted with water, or four fresh tomatoes, and boil fifteen minutes.
This is a compressed sketch of a small ragù rather than a full recipe, and the original gives almost no quantities. The proportions below are the ones that make it work as written.
- The ham fat is the whole flavour baseUse about 2 oz of fat trimmed from prosciutto, or pancetta or unsmoked bacon in its place. It should be chopped fine and rendered slowly until the vegetables can sweat in it; if it browns hard at the start the sauce turns bitter.
- "A little onion, celery, carrot, and parsley"This is the Italian battuto: roughly a small onion, one stick of celery, one small carrot and a few parsley stalks, all chopped very fine. Once softened in the fat it becomes the soffritto. Chop it finer than you would for a stew, since nothing here is strained out.
- "A small piece of beef"Genuinely ambiguous. Around 6-8 oz of chuck or shin, either minced or cut in small dice, gives a sauce in proportion to the vegetables. "Well colored" means browned all over, not merely grey.
- Wine measureOne and a half tablespoons is very little by modern habit, and it is meant to be cooked away entirely before the tomato goes in. Wait until the pan smells of wine rather than alcohol.
- Tomato paste is stronger nowTomato options -- Use the tablespoon of paste the recipe calls for, diluted in about half a cup of water; if your paste is a modern double concentrate, keep the measure scant. Four fresh tomatoes should be peeled and seeded, or the sauce stays watery.
- Fifteen minutes is the minimumThat is long enough for tomato paste and a fine mince, but diced chuck will still be tough. Add water as needed and give it 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer for a sauce with any depth.
- Season at the endNo salt is mentioned in the recipe at all. Taste once the tomato has reduced, since the rendered ham fat is already salty and salting early easily overshoots.
- Yield and useWith the quantities suggested above, makes roughly a cup - enough to sauce pasta for two, or to spoon over eggs.
Antonia Isola's Simple Italian Cookery (1912) was among the earlier books to put everyday Italian home cooking in front of an American audience, and this entry is a good example of its method: no weights, no timings beyond the essential one, and the assumption that the cook can judge a soffritto by eye. What it describes is a small sugo di carne, built on the same battuto of onion, celery, carrot and parsley that opens most Italian braises. The very short list of tomato options, paste diluted with water or four fresh tomatoes, also marks the period: tinned tomato paste was becoming available in Italian-American groceries, but fresh tomatoes were still seasonal, and a cook was expected to use whichever was at hand.