You’ll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.

Andrew Largeman, a character in Garden State, a film that was written and directed by Zach Braff some years ago.

A group of people that miss the same imaginary place. That phrase really stuck in my head when I saw the movie, and it’s stayed there ever since. Go see the film if you haven’t already, you won’t regret it. [And you don't have to take my word for it either. An IMDB rating of 7.9, spread out over 90,000+ votes, nearly a thousand reviews, that's some going.]

It wasn’t long after that when Jyri Engestrom started riffing with the idea of social objects, and when Hugh MacLeod picked it up and spoke to me at length about the concept, part of me was still completely stuck in the Andrew Largeman mindset. The same imaginary place.

And that’s part of the reason I share some of the things I do via twitter: The music I listen to. The food I’m cooking or eating. The films I’m watching; the books I’m reading; the places I go to. Sometimes what I share is in the immediate past, sometimes it’s in the present, sometimes all I’m doing is declaring my intent. Because, paraphrasing John Lennon, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

When we share our experiences of sights and sounds and smells, we recreate the familiar imaginary places we share with others. We use these digital objects as the seed, as one dimension of the experience to flesh out the rest of that experience. So we take the sound or image or location or even in some cases the smell, and we extrapolate it into a rich memory of that particular experience. Which is often a worthwhile thing to do, for all the people who shared that “imaginary place” with you.

This has become more valuable as a result of phenomena like Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, that have made it easier for you to share the digital objects with the people you shared the original experience with. Which is why any tool that helps you capture what you’re watching or reading or listening to or visiting or eating is worth experimenting with.

This is something I’ve been doing for some time now, playing with every tool that comes on to the market, trying to see what it gives me that others didn’t. [When I started doing this, I had to come to terms quite quickly with the fact that some people don't like being on the receiving end of all this "sharing". More than once, I thought long and hard about segmenting my stream so that people could tune in or tune out of the particular segment. But I've stayed "whole" nevertheless. More on this later].

I’ve written about social objects a few times, even touched on the topic of something analogous to a graphic equaliser for an individual lifestream, yet I felt it was worth while in discussing them further in the context of “a group of people that miss the same imaginary place”. This time around, I want to concentrate on the ecosystem, on the tools and conventions we will need. Because that’s how sharing of experiences can become simpler, more extensive, more valuable.

I think we do five things with digital objects:

• Introduce the object into shared space
• Experience (and re-experience) the object
• Share what you’re experiencing with others
• Place in context that experience
• Connect and re-connect with the family that has the same shared imaginary place

So to my way of thinking, once I start going down this road, every music site, every photo site, every video site, every audio site, they’re all about helping us introduce digital objects into shared space.

Many of these introducer sites also double up as experiencer sites: so you can watch the videos, hear the music and so on.

Every community site then becomes a way of sharing the experience of those objects: every review, every rating, every post, every link, every lifestream, all these are just ways of sharing our experiences, sometimes with commentary, sometimes without.

As more people get connected, and as the tools for sharing get better, and as the costs of sharing drop, we’re going to have the classic problems that we’ve already learnt about from the web in general. There are too many firehoses. It becomes hard to know what is out there, harder to find the right things. Errors, inaccuracies, even lies abound. (Digital objects are easy to modify).

So metadata becomes important. Preferably automated, so that authenticity is verifiable. Preferably low-cost and high-speed. Preferably indelibly associated with the digital object. Preferably easy to augment with tags and folksonomies and hashtags. Times, places, people. Names and descriptions. Devices involved, settings for those devices. History of views, listens, access, usage, editing. The edits themselves.

Authenticity becomes even more important. Watermarking the object while at the same time allowing copies of the object to be modified.

Search tools have to get better. I’ve been reading and re-reading Esther Dyson’s The Future of Internet Search for some time now, linking what she’s saying to what I’m thinking about here. Esther has been a friend and mentor for a long time; when she has something to say, I shut up and listen.

Visualisation tools also have to get better, which is why I spend time reading stuff like Information is Beautiful, why I visit feltron or manyeyes.

Sometimes many of these things happen in one place, elegantly and beautifully. That’s why I like Chris Wild’s Retroscope, why I like How To Be A Retronaut. It helps us place into context some of the things we share, some of the things we used to share.

Sometimes the tools for doing some of this move us into new dimensions, as in the case of layar and augmented reality, or for that matter AR spectacles. Noninvasive ways of overlaying information on to physical objects, ways that allow us to share the imaginary place more effectively.

As a young man, I was an incurable optimist. While time has tempered that optimism, my outlook on life continues to be positive, so positive that people sometimes claim I’m almost Utopian. Yet I still remember two quotations that were like kryptonite to the Superman of my optimism.

The first was Thoreau’s: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. And the second was Burke’s: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing“.

There are many things we have to get better at, and many people working hard to make sure that, collectively, we get better at them. Feeding the world, eradicating poverty and the illnesses associated with poverty. Making sure every child has access to basic education. Improving healthcare, moving from cure to prevention, moving from symptom to root cause. Being better neighbours. Being better stewards of our environment.

I have never found it easy to accept that so many people are fundamentally lonely; I have never found it easy to accept that so many people are fundamentally depressed. And I have always wanted to do whatever I can to prevent these things from happening.

The tools we have today can help us eradicate loneliness and depression in ways that pharmacology can only dream of. Those tools can and will get better.

Of course there are things that come in the way, things we have to deal with first. Concepts like intellectual property rights have to be overhauled from the abominations they represent today, rebuilt from the ground up. Concepts like privacy and confidentiality have to be reformed to help us bring back community values that were eroded over the last 150 years or so. Human rights have to be reframed in a global context, the very concept of a nation re-interpreted, a whole new United Nations formed.

But while all that happens, we can help. By continuing to create ways that people remember the familiar shared imaginary places, by reminding ourselves what family means.

Family is not about blood alone, it is about covenant relationships. When something goes wrong in a covenant relationship, you don’t look for someone to blame, or even sue. You look for ways to fix it. Together.

Families don’t just share a past, they share a present. And a future. Social objects are, similarly, not just about the past, they’re about the present, they’re about the future.

We’re on the start of a whole new journey, and so we spend time learning about sharing by declaring past and present experiences. Soon we will get better at sharing intentions.

Soon we will get better at sharing imaginary places that are in the future, not in the past or present.

Soon. to paraphrase the prophet Joel,  our old men shall dream dreams, our young men shall see visions.

As I said, trivial reasons.

And then one day, like learning to ride a bicycle, all those trivial reasons disappeared. In a matter of hours I was cooking tandoori without a tandoor, not worrying about recipes, actually liking what I cooked and looking forward to eating it. And being able t0 wash up quickly and efficiently.

Why was this? How did it happen?

First, it was because of epicurious. The more I used epicurious, the more I knew about how to get to the right recipes. There’s gold dust in there. Like this recipe for tandoori-style grilled meat or shrimp. 6 servings. Active time 20 minutes. Total time 4.5 hours. Eight ingredients for the marinade, nothing complex, very little work to be done with them. A simple recipe that pretty much consisted of : make marinade. leave meat to marinate. cook. So thank you epicurious.

Second, we discovered cooking liners. No more heavy-duty pan scrubbing needed. Easy to clean and wash, totally reusable. Even dishwasher-friendly.

So here’s the story:

Put the first 8 ingredients into a blender. It should look something like this:

The blended marinade should look something like this:

Marinating “protein” should look like this:

At the start of grilling, it should look a bit like this:

Halfway through it should look like this:

And then at the end it should look like this:

Seriously, it works. 20 minutes of activity, and everything happens just as Victoria Granof, the “author” of the recipe, says it should. Thank you Victoria.

For me, it’s not just about the food, which I love. It’s about how preparing such food is becoming more accessible to many of us. How a site like epicurious works, how people share their “content” freely, how the recipes get reviewed and annotated and voted up and down, how the community participates in all this. How someone like me, from Calcutta, can sit in Windsor, Berkshire and use a recipe submitted by a Cordon Bleu trained pastry chef and relating to cuisine closer to my birthplace than hers by an order of magnitude.

The community element is important, but so is the understanding that for subjects like this, community votes by themselves are of no value. These votes need to be tuned to my personal taste and trust levels. Some intelligence, some wisdom, some experience, some “curation” has to be applied.

It’s like book reviews. Sometimes I run out of things to read while at an airport, usually because I didn’t allow for the scale of delay. So I go to the bookstore or equivalent and take a look. There’s no point my looking for any of my favourite authors, I tend to know about their new books and would usually have bought and read them already. Which means I’m truly in the realm of “airport reads”. And I scan the paperbacks quickly, looking for authors I haven’t heard of. When I find one, I tend to check the inside front cover area for soundbite reviews.

But there’s a short cut. If one of those reviews is by Kirkus then I buy the book, no further questions asked. If the review is a “starred review” then I buy everything else by that author available in that shop.

You see, over the years, I trust Kirkus. [If you want to understand about trust and recommendation and their role in building relationships, in buying and selling, in business in general, then go read Chris Brogan's Trust Agents. Now.]

That’s what it comes down to, trust. Curation is the process by which aggregate data is imbued with personalised trust.

That’s what Victoria Granof did for me. She appears to spend time going around the world collecting recipes and trying them out, sampling cuisines I am interested in, using cooking styles that appeal to me. Slow and relaxed, simple without being mechanical or bland, relying on natural ingredients.

Community input is valuable. Community voting and recommendation mechanisms help control firehoses, and are far better than product advertising. But you need something more. You need the recommenders to be people you trust, because their tastes are similar to yours. Discovering taste similarity is not easy; it can be automated, but you know something? There’s a lot of joy to be had in the discovery process. Because it makes you do something.

Doing is good.

]]> http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2010/02/14/of-lazy-tandoori-and-epicuration/feed/ 3 http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2009/12/02/thinking-about-food-and-music-and-climate-change/ http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2009/12/02/thinking-about-food-and-music-and-climate-change/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:31:50 +0000 JP http://confusedofcalcutta.com/?p=1830 I think about food. A lot. In fact I’m perennially hungry, have been that way ever since I can remember. So it should come as no surprise that every now and then, I try and view things from the perspective of food.

Take music for example. Recorded music. Music that has been bottled or canned or preserved.

The ability to preserve music in this form is fairly recent in human history. And without this ability, the whole argument about downloads and ripping and  format transformation rights and I don’t know what else falls by the wayside.

So when I look at this diagram, and read this report, I begin to wonder. Incidentally, there’s a worthwhile series of posts on the subject here and here, dealing, for example, with the winner-takes-all bias in some of this.

I know how I feel about preserved food. About preservatives in food. About additives and e-numbers and what-have-you. I know how I insist on using fresh herbs and spices when I cook, even though it takes longer and it’s more expensive.  I know how I dislike frozen food, how much I dislike frozen food. I will not knowingly eat something that has been microwaved if I can avoid it. These things I know.

There was a time when there was no such thing as frozen food. In the history of food the ability to freeze food and reheat later is fairly recent.

There is a cost to freezing and transporting and heating frozen food. That cost will soon become more apparent to people, as awareness of carbon footprint in the food transportation and processing business grows. And more people will start eating local produce again.

And maybe we’re going to see something similar about music and film and sport. If this whole DRM and downloads and intellectual property rights debate continues to get out of hand, criminalising entire generations and seeking to corrupt and destroy the value of the internet, then we’re going to see a revolution.

We will see a renaissance of live music, of live performances, of live sport. Local teams supported. Local farmers supported. Local playwrights and poets and authors supported.

We will see a renaissance of travelling bands, of authors and poets on roadshows reading their own works.

We will see a renaissance of people paying to see artists perform, rather than paying for the right to perhaps maybe one day hear something recorded, canned and preserved, something they have to climb DRM Everest to hear, and even then it may not be possible.

DRMers and dreamers. Which one are you?

One of the great things about dishes like ragu with pasta is that there’s so much scope for experimentation.

You can vary the pasta in use: the traditional spaghetti, the more recent penne, the gramigna that the people in Bologna swear by, the paccheri that the Neapolitans used to smuggle garlic, any of thousands of varieties of pasta.

In fact you don’t even have to use pasta.

You can vary the meat. Some swear by pork, some by lamb, some by beef. Some mix pork and lamb. In Sorrento I was served buffalo. Those in the know in Bologna said that the best thing to do is to use salsiccia, a local sausage. But you know what? Even they would say it’s up to you.

Up to you. That’s the beauty of cooking. Someone makes a recipe up. Someone else uses a recipe that’s been in her family for generations. Someone else uses a cookery book. Or even the Web (I’m a regular user of epicurious).

You can use a recipe, but you don’t have to follow it.

It used to be said that human beings go through three stages of development: dependence (as in parent-child); independence (as in adolescent); then interdependence (as in grown-up). These stages are also visible in organisations as they develop: how business units have a dependent relationship on the centre, then flex their muscles as they grow, finally coming to a mutually respectful and valuable relationship over time.

So it is with cooking. I remember a time when the only way I could cook was to follow a recipe parrot-fashion. Then came a time when I wanted to do my own thing, experiment with abandon. Now I read recipes and change them as I want or need: sometimes I have to vary ingredients because one of the guests has a medical condition, known allergic reaction or low tolerance for some critical component of a dish.

What’s all this got to do with Cory Doctorow? Simple. This post is a review of his latest book, Makers, which you can read “serially” for free over here at Tor, or pre-order here.

I’ve been fascinated by the concept of open multisided markets for many years now. How innovation flourishes, how business flourishes, how people flourish and how society as a whole gains from using open models for business. [If you want to learn more about open multisided markets, try reading Paying With Plastic or Invisible Engines, two excellent books on the subject; David Evans and Richard Schmalensee know their stuff and tell it well.]

Cory has done once again what he does so well: he has created a world where we can learn about the rich possibilities ahead of us in terms of cultural development, yet one which is fraught with risks because of the incredibly stupid things we can do. If we let ourselves.

I don’t want to spoil the book, so I’m going to say nothing whatsoever about the plot. What I am going to say is this:

Our world is full of franchise-based models, where people make money by doing something formulaic and controlling input ingredients, manufacturing process and output quality. In itself there is nothing wrong with a franchise model.

But you know something? I can make myself a hamburger or pizza any way I want. I don’t have to go to a particular franchise operator, or buy their ingredients, or use their recipes, or work their processes. I can if I want to. I don’t have to.

Imagine a world where someone managed somehow to patent the burger or the pizza, where it was no longer possible to make your own. You had to use someone else’s systems, their processes, their ingredients.

In a physical world this is hard to imagine, or, for that matter, to implement and police.

In a digital world it is a different matter altogether. We can police it. We can implement systems that force people to use particular systems, particular processes, particular ingredients. We can create artificial monopolies. And suffer the consequences.

I have always maintained that every artificial scarcity will be met with an equal and opposite artificial abundance; that’s why region coding on a DVD is an abject failure, why the music industry moved away from DRM, why we have to find new and pragmatic models for making sure creators and distributors of “content” are appropriately rewarded. [I've been visibly influenced by much that Cory has written in this respect; I'd also recommend the works of people like Larry Lessig, Terry Fisher, Jonathan Zittrain, the Berkman Center in general (with the mercurial Charlie Nesson). Rishab Aiyer Ghosh and the people at First Monday are also well worth a visit.]

There are many reasons to avoid creating new monopolies, not all of them pinko tree-hugger in origin. We are learning every day about the value of diversity in genes (I was lucky enough to hear Cary Fowler speak on the subject recently: if you’re interested, take a look at The Threatened Gene, even though it was written nearly two decades ago.)

Gene diversity gives us options for the future, options for conditions and scenarios we haven’t faced, don’t face but could face in the future. What is true for plants is in its own way true for cultures, for the way we think and act, for what we believe.

And there’s something far more important at stake here, how we as human beings learn and develop and create and experience things. What Pat Kane builds out so majestically for in The Play Ethic. What Dan Bricklin expounds so masterfully in his essays on tools in Bricklin on Technology.

As a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cory knows a thing or two about the world we’re entering. The wonderful possibilities ahead of us. The potential for awful waste. The social, economic and political consequences of getting it right. Or wrong.

Makers is a book about that future. A book that brings together open multisided platforms, opensource and democratised innovation, distributed “edge-based” production, customer-driven demand creation, customer-participated supply.

Makers is a book that brings that future into shape in front of us, allows us to visualise the models that would make it work. Or break it. The implications for patents, for intellectual property rights in general. The role of money and credit and payments and micropayments. The rule of law; and where the law could be an ass.

Makers is a book which lets us get into the heads of the born digital, the grown up digital, the way they think about things. What their values are. Why we should take a leaf out of Larry Lessig’s Remix and make sure we don’t criminalise a whole generation by our lack of understanding.

Go ahead and read the book. Electronically. Or physically.

Go ahead and pay for it. Or not, as the case may be.

It’s your future. And mine. And ours. And those of our children. And a rattling good read as well.

The recipe for today’s attempt, shown above, is based on conversations with the chef in one of the restaurants in Bologna, I believe it was the Osteria dell’Orsa. Sadly I lost the scrap of paper he gave me for my notes, along with some of my other Bologna jottings, so I’ve tried to recall the recipe from memory.

What I could remember was the following: he recommended a 50:50 ratio of beef to pork; he suggested the use of white wine rather than red; asked me to quietly add half a glass of milk between the wine reduction and the tomato reduction and insisted on adding a crushed-to-powder chicken stock cube with some roasted garlic, once the tomatoes had been in for a while. So I then looked in epicurious for a recipe that came close, one that I felt I could play with in order to get close to what I remembered. And I found this one: Pasta with bolognese sauce, Gourmet, February 1997

I kept faith with that recipe as much as I could, just replacing the nutmegs with the garlic and chicken stock. Everything else was as per the Gourmet recipe; that way I could have some sense of ratios and proportions while trying to be faithful to the lost notes.

And you know what? It was worth it. It had the browny-dark-orangey colour I wanted (rather than the more common red of the over-tomatoed ragu); nearly two hours of cooking time, most of it on simmer, meant that the sauce was thick without being lumpy; the white wine seemed to work better with the pork, I could sense a difference from past attempts; and the late entry of the garlic gave the dish quite a good rounded balance.

One of the things I really liked about the recipe was the reduction-upon-reduction approach. Olive oil and butter; then wine; then milk; then tomatoes. It gave you a real sense of layering the sauce, brought the richness to life.

I’m sure every one of you has your own personal taste in ragu, so this is by no means an attempt to be definitive. But if you like your meat sauce to be low on the tomatoey-ness, if you like thick-but-not-lumpy sauce, and if you like your pork and your beef, then it’s worth trying out.

I’m really looking forward to the next ragu session, where I get the chance to use a recipe handed down by Jon Silk’s grandmother Emilia Bardelli. [Jon, thanks again for the recipe, looking forward to trying it out].

Particularly in winter, we try and have a roast meal every now and then. But we’re not legalistic about it, we are quite capable of having a roast in the summer as well. More often than not, the meat du jour is chicken, we don’t have a great deal of red meat at home. Similarly, more often than not, the roast is had on a Sunday, after church, the traditional “Sunday roast” lunch.

All this changed some months ago, when the church we belong to (www.kcionline.org) began to have two services in the morning, at 9.30 and at 11.30; there’s always someone in the family involved in something in the “second service”, so it has meant that the Sunday roast became less frequent.

So we adapted. We felt like a roast. And so we had a roast. Today. Saturday. As an evening meal. My wife and I both like rack of lamb, so I thought I’d augment the chicken and vegetables (that she was preparing) with some glazed lamb; we have some house guests staying with us at present; this way we didn’t have to cook a ginormous chicken, something I didn’t really want to do.

Today I decided I’d try the honey-and-mustard-glaze treatment with some fresh lamb. I used the epicurious recipe as a starter, varying it only where I felt it was absolutely necessary. What did I vary? I dropped the canned beef broth and went for fresh beef gravy instead; did the same with the canned chicken broth, went for fresh chicken gravy instead; chopped small plum tomatoes instead of using the tomato paste; reduced the all-purpose flour quantities, raised the honey and mustard quantities. But in essence I stayed with the recipe, my variants were not material.

How was it? Well, take a look for yourself:

Glazed roasts are enjoyable only when the glaze really “catches”, so I was keen to get the honey and mustard to a crisp golden level. I’ve done it before, just not with honey and mustard, so I was patient enough with the basting, I had faith that the goldening would occur. And it did.

Especially with rack of lamb, I try and keep the fleshy part of the chop as pink as I can get away with, crisping the edges as much as possible. It means basting regularly during the roasting, every five minutes or so during the entire 35-minute session.

This is what the end-product looked like. Honey-and-mustard glazed rack of lamb with roast parsnips and potatoes, steamed carrots and fine green beans. It’s quite easy to do: the entire meal took about an hour to prepare and serve.

Prior to this, I’ve tended to use fruit-based glazes: apricot, quince, plum, that sort of thing. After today’s experience, I’m probably going to stay with “thinner” glazes, they take less time, they’re easier to manage and they’re probably better for me as well.

As with most things I’m interested in, when it comes to cooking I’m a passionate amateur. So I’d love to learn more from you. What have you learnt? Where do you go for your recipes? Are there handed-down-dor-generation recipes you’re prepared to share with us? Are there specific blogs you find interesting and useful in this respect?

Comments and advice welcome. In the meantime I hope I’ve been of some help. I’d also like comments on this post as well… what worked for you, what didn’t.

Most of the time, we tend to do things together, fifteen people with an age range between eight and fifty. But we always make an exception: one night, we just go out as “adults”, the three sets of parents together. And last night was that night. We went to a place called Fonda San Miguel, specialising in Mexican food. While I’ve been there before, yesterday was special, special because of what I had as the main course, Mayan in origin.

It was called Pescado en Tikin-Xik, which apparently translates to “fish cooked in a dry-wing style”. It looks a bit like this:

[I didn't take my camera with me, so what you're seeing is a photograph accompanying the recipe I'm about to share with you.]

Since Tikin-Xik refers to a style of cooking, I assume it can be applied to anything, not just fish. Last night I was served black drum, which I understand is a local Texan saltwater fish line-caught, and it was amazing. Now the last time I spoke about food, one of the comments made hit home; it went something like “pictures good, recipes better”. So this time I’m providing a recipe as well. Here it is. While it’s not the recipe for the dish I was served, as far as I can make out the ingredients and treatment are very similar to what I had.

It looks like it would be real fun to cook, as long as you can get the ingredients. The red sauce (the recado rojo or achiote) seems makeable. Banana leaf is harder to get, but not impossible. The “butterflying” of the fish prior to its marination looks interesting and challenging; and dry-cooking the whole shebang over charcoal or a grill doesn’t look that hard either.

The way it was served to me, the entire package was tied up in cord as if it were a present. It felt like a present. It tasted like a present. I was definitely grateful for receiving it. And, as far as I can make out, it’s actually good for me as well.

Any adventurous cooks out there? Try it and let me know how you get on. And I’ll do the same.

I’d never really had good garganelli before, and, as was the case with the gramigna, I felt the pasta played a key role in setting off the sauce. As far as I could make out, there were two differences between garganelli and penne: one, the ends are parallel-cut for penne; and two, the fluting on the pasta tube is gentler on the garganelli.

Anyway, great sauce. Gentle, rich in flavour; a lingering aftertaste of good liver, grainy yet moist, sliding smoothly over the ridges on the pasta; light and easy, I could scrape the plate clean, no tell-tale oiliness remaining. And of course tending towards the golden yellow I like, rather than the common tomato-dominated red. I like my pomodoro on the side, not in the sauce.

I never really expected a winner.

But there was one. Hands down. Gramigna alla salsiccia by the inimitable Gabriel at

Trattoria Meloncello, via Saragossa 240/a, Bologna 40135

This review gives you a feel for the place.

This photograph, by Alessandro Guerani, gives you a feel for what gramigna alla salsiccia looks like. [Incidentally, do visit his flickr pages and food blog. They're worth it.]

Meloncello is a Macarthur restaurant. I’ll be back.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Just what is a well-made bolognese? If you look up wikipedia, this is what you get. The article starts off with the following:

Bolognese sauce (ragù alla bolognese in Italian, also known by its French name sauce bolognaise) is a meat based sauce for pasta originating in Bologna, Italy. Bolognese sauce is sometimes taken to be a tomato sauce but authentic recipes have only a small amount of tomato.

…authentic recipes have only a small amount of tomato. Okay, let’s park that thought for a moment.

The article then goes on to say:

The recipe, issued in 1982 by the Bolognese delegation of Accademia Italiana della Cucina, confines the ingredients to beef, pancetta, onions, carrots, celery, tomato paste, meat broth, white wine, and (optionally) milk or cream. However, different recipes, far from the Bolognese tradition, make use of chopped pork, chicken or goose liver along with the beef or veal for variety, or use butter with olive oil. Prosciutto, mortadella, or porcini fresh mushrooms may be added to the soffritto to enrich the sauce.

Okay, so it would appear that tomato paste is definitely part of the “official” recipe. So let’s then take a look at what the Accademia Italiana della Cucina actually has to say about this. More precisely, let’s take a look at what the Accademia says about Emilia-Romagna ragu sauces:

Pomodoro maturi (oppure pelati o concentrato).  So we still have the tomato, with different options.

So then I took a look at Heston Blumenthal’s Spaghetti Bolognese recipe. And a few more. And it confused me.

Everything I looked at had quite a bit of tomato in it. Yet the locals (and even Wikipedia for that matter) keep stating “only a small amount of tomato”.

I guess it’s all down to taste. You say tomahto and I say tomayto.

After five days, I know what I like. For me, the stuff that looks like this:

tastes infinitely better than the stuff that looks like this:

[Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia]. All I know is that the bolognese sauce I really like doesn’t have any red about it, the tomato is either in small amounts or slow-cooked to extinction.

As I said before, it’s a matter of taste. So I am looking for recipes that are low in tomato. Of course there are a million other things that matter, people use different meats, different spices, different ways of cooking. I’m just trying to simplify things for myself  by concentrating on the behaviour of one ingredient: the tomato. Fresh or not? Hand-peeled and hand-pressed or not? And how much. Pomodoro is assumed, I guess.

Comments please. As usual I will learn from them, and share what I learn.