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Meat Sauce (Put into a saucepan one pound)
Put into a saucepan one pound of beef and one-half an onion chopped up with three ounces of lard, some parsley, salt, pepper, one clove, and a very small slice of ham. Fry these over a hot fire for a few moments, moving them continually, and when the onion is browned add four tablespoons of red wine, and four tablespoons of tomato sauce (or tomato paste). When this sauce begins to sputter, add, little by little, some boiling water. Stick a fork into the meat from time to time to allow the juices to escape. Take a little of the sauce in a spoon, and when it looks a good golden color, and there is a sufficient quantity to cover the meat, put the covered saucepan at the back of the stove and allow it to simmer until the meat is thoroughly cooked. Then take out the meat, slice it, prepare macaroni, or any paste you desire, and serve it with the meat, and the sauce poured over all, and the addition of butter and grated cheese.
This is a Neapolitan-style sugo di carne: a single piece of beef braised slowly so that the sauce dresses the pasta and the meat becomes a second course. The hinge is that the meat goes in whole and stays whole for hours — nothing here is a quick sauce.
- The cut, not ground beef"One pound of beef" means a solid piece for braising — chuck, shin, or a piece of top round. It is browned whole and only sliced at the end, so a lean, fast-cooking cut will be dry and stringy after two hours.
- Three ounces of lardAbout 6 tablespoons, which is generous by modern taste. Half that is plenty for browning, and olive oil or butter will stand in without changing the character much; lard was a common Italian household cooking fat of the period.
- Tomato sauce or tomato pasteThese are not interchangeable in the quantity given. Four tablespoons of passata or plain tinned tomato is right; four tablespoons of modern concentrated tube or tin paste would be harsh, so use one to two and let the water do the rest.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood or coal range this was the cool corner — a bare tremble, not a bubble. On a modern hob use the lowest setting with a heat diffuser, or set the covered pan in a 300F oven. Reckon on two to three hours for chuck or shin.
- Adding boiling water little by littleThis is the whole technique. Each addition should reduce and colour before the next goes in, which is what produces the "good golden color" the recipe watches for. Adding all the liquid at once gives a thin, pale, boiled-tasting sauce.
- Sticking a fork into the meatThe recipe's own reason is to let the juices escape into the sauce. It also drains the beef, so if you want the sliced meat juicy rather than the sauce beefy, skip it — the long braise flavours the liquid well enough on its own.
- "Any paste you desire"Paste here is pasta, not a purée. Rigatoni, ziti or bucatini suit this sauce; the grated cheese intended is Parmigiano or a young pecorino.
- YieldNot stated in the recipe. As a rough guide the sauce will dress about a pound of dry pasta, and the sliced beef will serve four as a second course, in the traditional order: pasta first, meat after.
This is the classic Italian trick of getting two dishes from one pot — the sugo for the pasta and the braised beef, stracotto or carne al sugo, served afterwards — and it belongs to a domestic tradition where a single pound of meat had to feed a table. The book it comes from was published in the early 1910s under the name Antonia Isola, and set plain Italian home cooking before an English-reading American audience. The instruction to move the pan to "the back of the stove" tells you what kind of range the recipe assumes: one with a permanent gradient of heat, whether coal or wood, the appliance that made hours-long unattended simmering the natural way to cook tough meat. Tomato paste and wine appear in modest quantity, with the bulk of the liquid supplied by boiling water, rather than the tomato-heavy versions that later became standard abroad.