Italian or British? Writer solves riddle of spaghetti bolognese | Hacker News Reader

Italian or British? Writer solves riddle of spaghetti bolognese

theguardian.com

40 pointscruisestacy36 comments

Lol, everybody in Italy has had "spaghetti bolognese". We call them "spaghetti al ragù" and learn the name "spaghetti bolognese" the first time we are exposed to international gastronomy, possibly the first vacation abroad.

The issue here is about spaghetti not being the proper kind of pasta for the "ragù" sauce, tagliatelle is the traditional one. Ok, noted, but ragù is still a common sauce for spaghetti and maccaroni. Maybe not in high priced restaurants but definitely at most people's home. Basically you use what you have.

Now back to Python vs Ruby vs Node... :-)

Haha yep. This was a bit of a funny side joke in a Top Gear special, when they went through the Italy.

It's almost like you didn't read the article at all...

So if the official research states that you can vary the sauce to include oregano, basil, and garlic, optionally adding various cheeses, and you can vary the pasta between tagliatelle (fresh egg pasta) and dried spaghetti (and you can vary the name between spaghetti al ragù, spaghetti bolognese or spaghetti alla bolognese) then that's really a pretty wide range of dishes.

Interesting that restaurants focused on serving the dish with tagliatelle, in part because fresh pasta cooked faster ... fast food, not high cuisine. White tablecloths eat your heart out!

In the same spirit, I wonder if we will create a tagliatelle version for Infinite Food one day? http://8-food.com/

Only in Italy, where slightly different shaped pasta magically means a completely different meal.

Hehe, that's some well placed cynicism. I've been looking in to what makes a noodle dish (normally a noodle soup) from various parts of Burma/China/Laos/Thailand/Vietnam/Japan unique, and it's been fascinating. I would say there's far more variety in Asia than in Italy.

I've always found it interesting how native American foods (tomatoes, potatoes, peanuts, chilis, corn, strawberry, pineapple, etc.) have been integrated into "traditional" cuisines around the world. Italian spaghetti sauce or Thai peanut sauce, etc. have only been available for a few hundred years max... Still a lot, but some other traditions go back millennia.

A lot of really old recipes, say, those dating to the roman era or even only the renaissance, are very unpalatable for modern tastes.

Do you know of any good repository of (as far as we know) accurate recipes from that sort of time? I'd love to be able to cook a Roman dinner one night or something.

Here's a video series of foods from the 1700s - which is a few hundred years after what you're talking about, but still interesting: [Jas. Townsend](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxr2d4As312LulcajAkKJYw)

The Apicius Cookbook

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius

(Pdf) http://kitchenproject.com/history/apicius/Apicius.pdf

Having spent very little time in the Roman Empire I can't vouch for its authenticity, but http://www.passthegarum.co.uk/ looks like an interesting source of recipes.

Yes this is why I always find it funny when people worry about if a dish is "authentic". To what time period? It seems most peoples concept of authentic is what people were eating in the late 19th/early 20th century. Not long before that, peasants were eating gruel.

Indeed. And it goes both ways, of course. There are, for instance, many (delicious) traditional Mexican dishes that would have been impossible prior to contact from Europeans.

> Controversy surrounding the dish resurfaced last month, when Antonio Carluccio became the latest in a long line of chefs to complain that one of Britain’s favourite “Italian” dishes did not, in fact, exist in Italy

Food snobs like those really get on my nerves. I mean, it's one thing when one starts adding cream to carbonara (or make it with just cream, like they do in the UK) but swapping spaghetti for tagliatelle is hardly a crime. And like the article said, people in Italy are not that anal about the type of pasta - ragù is one of the universal sauces you serve with anything. I grew up eating Spaghetti al Ragù on sundays in my local trattoria.

Besides, ragù alla bolognese is only ONE type of ragù. There are others, even if we just to stick to the traditional ones, which are eaten with all sort of pasta shapes: hare ragù (pappardelle), sicilian ragù (eaten with small ring pasta), neapolitan ragù (maccheroni or rigatoni), lamb ragù, pork ragù...

And throwing a hissy fit for adding a bit of garlic, surely, it doesn't go well with the sauce, but it's hardly a crime against humanity.

I definitely agree.

BTW, in Italy we call them spaghetti alla bolognese

Which means what exactly?

"Spaghetti in the the style of Bologna", as opposed to what can perhaps be interpreted in the English phrasing as "bolognese spaghetti"

alla = "a type of seasoning/condiment/cooking"

Examples:

Pasta alla carbonara

Pizza alla marinara

Trenette al pesto

Let's note that grammatically 'alla', 'al', etc. is 'at/in/towards' + 'the', but in this idiomatic use gives the meaning in the parent comment.

Yes and no, it is "worse" than that.

In this particular use (for bolognese or pescatora, amatriciana, etc.) "a/al/alla" means "in the style of", BUT when it is pasta al ragù (al pesto, al pomodoro, etc., i.e. other main ingredients) the "a/al/alla" means "with".

And we have also our own exceptions, one says "Pappardelle sul cinghiale" (pappardelle is yet another type of pasta), literally "pappardelle on the hog", BUT you don't have the "a" in "spaghetti aglio e olio (e peperoncino)".

As a side note a "ragù" has nothing to do with the (usually horrible) tomato sauce that is used for "spaghetti bolognese" outside Italy.

Never heard "pappardelle sul cinghiale"! Sort of slang, maybe.

Mai sentito parlare prima di pappardelle sul cinghiale, è un uso abbastanza dialettale mi sa.

Ovviamente non si può non concordare sul ragù. ;)

Well, they are typical of an area, and they are called like them there, so it is maybe somehow a "dialect" but I would rather say an "idiom":

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pappardelle_sul_cinghiale

https://books.google.it/books?id=M_vYmUgN3e0C&pg=PA289&lpg=P...

you won't find, in any restaurant or "trattoria" in the area written on a menu "al" cinghiale.

It is typical - I believe - of "pappardelle", they are also sometimes (less common recipes) "sulla lepre" or "sul papero".

Where I come from we have this dish called "fish greek style" which apparently is known in Greece as "fish russian style" and not known in Russia at all. Or so the urban legend says.

I happen to currently live in Bologna, I've had the local tagliatelle al ragù and all I can say is that it makes so much more sense to have it this way instead of using spaghetti - it's simply better.

I thought the whole issue was around the spaghetti meatballs, not the bolognese which is well known in the majority of Italy. Duh.

Even if not Italian, why on Earth would spaghetti bolognese be British? I've eaten them in many countries around Europe...

that's right, they are american. Sicilian immigrants could barely afford beef in their native Sicily, so when they started having a little more money in their pockets in America, they started adding beef to everything. Which is where spaghetti with meatballs comes from as well. No italian has ever had spaghetti with meatballs.

Spaghetti bologese != Spaghetti meatballs

America isn't the only country to have had lots of immigration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italians_in_the_United_Kingdom

Viz. Peter Capaldi, current Dr Who. Something like 1.5% of the Scottish population has Italian ancestry.

Yeah, the idea British can cook, let alone have better dishes then Italy, is outrageous to being with.

A riddle? Did someone ever really think that this was a british dish and that no one in Italy could come up with a tomato+meat sauce?

Simplifying somewhat, most Britons believe it's a genuine Italian dish, and most Italians believe it's a horrible British parody of their cuisine.

This article is such click bait.

> What he discovered was that spaghetti has been consumed and produced in Bologna and in the neighbouring countryside since the 16th century.

It's funny to read about someone denying eating some kind of food. But, then:

> Italians’ rigid adherence to cooking traditions, Valdiserra said, is linked to the false belief that they have not changed much over centuries.

So it becomes a matter of pride and tradition. I'm curious what future generations will think about our habits: raw foods vs processed ones, vegetarian vs meat farms, diversity vs individually tailored according to genetic profile and needs.

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