Author: JP

Macarthur restaurants and gramigna alla salsiccia

I spent six days in Bologna looking for the best ragu in town. So many restaurants, so little time. It was an unscientific process. Read books, talk to people, decide where to go, order the dish, taste it, savour it, savour it some more, savour it until dish is empty, repeat cycle.

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.

The New Blue?

No more Blue Screens of Death. Instead, we have these:

Contributions to the collection welcome. Just e-mail me at [email protected].

Musing lazily about library science and the web

I’ve been digging around the works of S.R. Ranganathan for some time now, triggered by reading David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous just over a year ago (as reported here).

Regular readers may remember Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science:

  1. Books are for use.
  2. Every reader his or her book.
  3. Every book its reader.
  4. Save the time of the reader.
  5. The Library is a growing organism.

Well, regular readers may have remembered them, but I didn’t. For some strange reason my mind blanked out on the first one, I could only remember four. So I did what anyone would do, and looked up Wikipedia. Found what I wanted. Loitered languorously in the area without intent. And came across this, by Alireza Noruzi:

Application of Ranganathan’s Laws to the Web: “The Five Laws of The Web”

  1. Web resources are for use.
  2. Every user his or her web resource.
  3. Every web resource its user.
  4. Save the time of the user.
  5. The Web is a growing organism.

Read the rest of Alireza’s paper, as he explains why he thinks the way he does. It’s worth it. More later.

Is being “connected” becoming a “sense”?

Over the years I’ve started to think harder about being “connected” by thinking harder about what it means not to be “connected”. By this I do not mean the traditional debate about the digital haves versus the digital have-nots, a discussion that soon goes down rabbitholes of economics-meets-education. By this I do not mean the traditional debate about net neutrality and cheap bits and expensive bits and who will pay, that’s another discussion that soon goes down the same rabbitholes, but with a twist of politics as well.

I mean something else altogether.

Today, I was sitting quietly in an exhibit that looked like a theatre in the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (known locally as MAMbo), waiting to see what happened next. I was the only person in this theatre-within-a-museum at the time. And what happened next was this. Two people, a man and a woman, started talking about their experiences of being blind. They talked about the difference between being blind from birth and becoming blind after having normal sight for a while. They talked about the role that memory played in that second instance, the memory of sight. How it became a frame of reference for many things later. How that memory decayed. How it played tricks.

And something about the way they spoke made me think of how kids today perceive being connected, particularly in the West, but increasingly in India and China as well.

You may gather from this that I think of being connected as an important thing. You’d be right. That’s why I wrote The Kernel For This Blog and About This Blog the way I did.

You see, I think connectivity, particularly ubiquitous always-on mobile connectivity, can make a real difference in terms of health, education and welfare, and that it can make a difference today. The days of “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers” and “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” are long gone. Today the BRICS have bricks in their hands, the bricks are getting smaller and they’re always on.

Too often, when people try and make this point, the objections are common and predictable. “You don’t get it, these people need food first. They’re starving.”. And so the debate about connectivity gets waylaid. Ironically, this is often done by people who then pump up the volume about the importance of biofuels in solving the energy crisis…. the same biofuels that then drive grain prices up and make staple food harder to afford for many people…..but that’s another debate.

All I was thinking was this. Is connectivity becoming like sight and hearing and speech and mobility? And if so what does that mean for the endless debates we appear to be having about what the internet and the web are?

[An aside. If I take this analogy in reverse, I land up in strange places. Told you I was confused. Like a year ago I spotted David Beckham at the Diana concert. With my bare eyes. Was I somehow trammelling over his image rights as a result? Should my eyes be cut out in order to feed the God of DRM? That’s the way a lot of DRM logic appears to me.]

You say tomayto, and I say tomahto

One of the joys of spending time in Bologna is that I don’t need an excuse to order dishes with bolognese sauce every day. And one of the joys of growing old is that I can claim to do this in the name of “research”. Stuff and nonsense, as you well know. The main reason I have had some bolognese sauce every day is that I love it. Especially when it is well made.

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.