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Meat Sauce (Take a small piece of beef)
Take a small piece of beef, a small piece of ham, fat and lean, one tablespoon of butter, a small piece of onion, a small piece of carrot, a small piece of celery, a pinch of flour, one-half cup of bouillon (or same amount of water), pepper. Cut the meat into small dice; chop up fine together the ham, onion, carrot, and celery. Put these all together with some pepper into a saucepan with the butter, and when the meat is brown, add the pinch of flour, and the bouillon a little at a time (or the water), and cook for about one-half an hour. This sauce should not be strained.
A small-batch meat sauce built on a classic battuto of ham, onion, carrot and celery. The quantities are deliberately loose, in the way Italian home cooks wrote them, so the proportions matter more than the numbers.
- The hinge: brown the meat properlyThe whole flavour of a sauce this brief comes from browning. Give the diced beef and chopped ham room in the pan and let them take real colour before the flour goes in; crowding steams them and the finished sauce tastes thin and pale.
- Reading "a small piece"Nothing here is measured, and it is not worth pretending otherwise. Treat the beef as the bulk, the ham as a seasoning, and keep the chopped vegetables to a background quantity rather than a stew.
- The ham"Fat and lean" means a piece with its fat left on, and the fat is doing as much work as the meat. Pancetta or prosciutto is the closest easy substitute; American smoked ham pulls the sauce in a different direction.
- No salt in the listThe cured ham salts the sauce, and bouillon may already be salty. Taste at the end before adding any.
- BouillonHomemade meat broth. Commercial stock or even water works, but if using water expect a leaner sauce and lean harder on the browning.
- Adding liquid a little at a timeWith only a pinch of flour, dribbling in the half cup keeps the sauce from breaking into fat and watery broth. It should end up glossy and barely bound, not gravy-thick.
- Half an hourShort for a meat sauce, but the meat is cut into small dice rather than left in a lump, so it works. Keep it at a bare simmer; if it reduces dry before the time is up, add another splash of broth.
- Not strainedWorth taking seriously. Many contemporary meat sauces, especially in the French manner, were pressed through a sieve into a smooth sauce; this one is meant to stay rustic and textured.
- YieldA small quantity, enough to dress pasta or rice for two, or to moisten a small dish of boiled rice.
This is a meat sauce in its most economical form: onion, carrot and celery chopped fine with cured pork, fried in butter with diced beef, and moistened a little at a time until it becomes a sauce. The use of butter rather than oil, and the instruction to leave the sauce unstrained, set it apart from the strained, refined meat gravies that French-trained cooks of the period would have produced from much the same ingredients.