Spag Bol

or, forty years of resistance to authenticity

My bolognese, back in the day, had pickle in the base,
My bolognese the other day had added miso paste.
My bolognese, tomorrow’s way, might ape nostalgia's taste
Yet they are all, whatever way, inauthentically great.

Once upon a time, the argument of how to make something ‘correctly’ was fought, village to village. Jilly uses lard in her shortcrust yet Bill from one village over uses marg, that is how Mother taught him. Today we quibble over the correct way with Northern Thai curries or Indonesian roti canai.

My belief is that the current obsession with authenticity in food stems from the publishing boom of the late 90s. Books such as Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories, Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef, How To Eat by Nigella Lawson, Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail, and a whole slew of Nigel Slater books, all put forth a take on authentic cooking, one way or another. These books cherry-picked an idealised culinary identity and sold it to us in the millions.

I learned to cook young. The eldest of six children, I guess at some point it was just convenient for me to take the reins. Aged five, I have a memory of making omelettes for myself and my brother. Confusing what I had been taught, I produced an omelette that was light and baveuse, on the one hand, but also filled with sugar and lemon on the other. Early missteps aside, I was soon cooking batches of family favourites, with one dish on particularly heavy rotation.

My early bolognese, informed by the 90’s Surrey of my childhood, was an English dish. I would heat some butter (not oil) in a large pan and empty in minced beef. Smashing it to pieces with the back of a wooden spoon, it went from pink and raw to greyish brown. At this point, I had been shown to add two big spoonfuls of Branston pickle, a spoonful of tomato puree, a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce and two tins of tomatoes. A lid would be popped on, and this would simmer away whilst pasta was cooked. To serve, pasta was piled onto plates and a good spoonful of sauce was sat atop each plateful. Sometimes we had a little pot of dried parmesan to dust over the top, sometimes we used grated mild cheddar. I am yet to discover whom I can blame for teaching my mum this recipe.

By the time I graduated to what might be considered a proper ragu a la Bolognese, I was eighteen and on my way to cookery school. It was the early 00s and, with Jamie Oliver as my guide, I was starting to understand a little more about the origin of these dishes I had been unquestioningly cooking for years.

I recall with sentient clarity the moment I discovered that spaghetti bolognese was a uniquely British construct, that in Italy a ragu similar to what I had been making would traditionally be paired with tubular, ridged or flat pasta so that the sauce might cling to it; that classically a meat ragu would be cooked gently for hours; that often wine and milk, either or both, were used; that the meat sauce would be a special treat, served as part of a family feast on a Sunday, perhaps.

Despite my disillusionment at my family version’s authenticity, spag bol remained an unquestioned staple. I experimented in line with my new knowledge. I started to use a blend of pork and beef, I learned the merits of a sofrito, the pickle was dispensed with, red wine was introduced, likewise, milk and fresh parmesan were finally adopted. The pasta was now tossed through the sauce in the pan and served as one. It was, though, still very much spag bol. Jamie had opened my eyes, what I was cooking wasn’t strictly authentically Italian, but I was a million miles closer to cooking an authentic version of a good spag bol, and he would have approved of that.

By the 2010s I was a chef who had passed through the kitchens of some properly good London restaurants. Newly at the Dock Kitchen in Ladbroke Grove, I was rising up through the kitchen, absorbing sponge-like from chefs who’d worked at The River Cafe, had lived and cooked in Tuscany or worked on an olive farm and cooked each night with Nonna. I was travelling too; to Italy, Spain, Greece, Kerala and Turkey; eating and learning and driving at the beating heart of dishes we would put on menus back in London. Authenticity was the thing, the metric by which success would be judged. 

We imported ingredients from their homeland, equipment too; used original local techniques so that we might grind a spice or use a flour in the correct, most authentic way. And this affected my cooking at home. I would roll my eyes now when the old family favourite was served, the sauce still spooned on top of the pasta, pickle still in the base. I would performatively toss my own pasta with the sauce before eating, displaying my knowledge of the authentic Italian way in the hope that they may be saved by my teaching. When I would cook for my family, authentically worthy dishes would be laid at their door. No spag bol, not now I understood. I would not lower myself to its level. I made ragu to be served with pasta, of course I did, only now it might be pork, fennel and milk; or beef short rib in Barolo; or chicken livers, prosciutto and sage.

I am no longer a restaurant chef, instead a writer and publisher. I have developed thousands of recipes, some of them drawn with archaeological precision from cultures and cuisines worldwide, some of them a deliberate fusion of ingredients and techniques all aimed at ease, deliciousness, and delight.

I am also at a place of having nearly forty years of personal food history. If I look, from today, at the kid cooking bolognese in 1990, this would be akin to that kid, at that stove, looking back to 1950. In the case of my ragu a la Bolognese, I’d be looking back to an Italy just recovering from occupation, rebuilding its culinary identity, and still thirteen years away from founding the concept of its DOP designation, thus setting in stone the concept of things needing to be truly authentic to carry any real weight on a quickly globalising world stage.

Using Branston pickle in the base of a bolognese is genius in the same way that today, looking for quick flavour, I might combine onions, miso, Chinese fermented mushrooms and a tablespoon of Sriracha in the base of a quick ragu. The ragu might be tossed with pappardelle or with udon, might be seasoned with parmesan or with fish sauce and soy. Authenticity is nothing but a contextualising piece of intrigue in my current kitchen; something nebulous, something subjective, and something in constant flux. It is useful background information, not a straight-jacket, and it should never be so.

Village to village from Puglia, Lyon, Cadiz, Corfu, Antalya, Udaipur, Yao Noi, Manila, Osaka or Hunan, people will cook dishes true to them and sacrilegious to their neighbour, their neighbour will do the same, and their neighbour too. Once this localised diversity has been flattened by the globalising force of the internet, we’re sold neat ubiquity wax-sealed as authentic.

Beware this myth.

Cook, that is the thing. Run roughshod over rights and wrongs and recipes that restrict you, they were inauthentic from the start. Try things, taste everything, and make food that delights you. Surely life is too short to do anything else.