The first meal that I learned to make was bolognese. It was a functional choice, based around the notion that learning to cook can help with budgeting and frugality. It's a recipe with a similar structure to others; once you've made it, you can also make chilli con carne, the base of a shepherd's pie and countless other things too. Occasionally, I'll wish that my formative years were charmingly idyllic, where I helped my parents prepare cakes and pastries that we could leave to cool on the edge of a countryside windowpane (disclaimer: my childhood didn't feature any homemade baked goods, and I'm always amazed by those who did) but that just wasn't the slant of my upbringing. Cooking in our house was about functionality first, and pleasure second.
I realise that this is the antithesis of the culinary coming-of-age stories featured on most blogs. I could sit here and gripe about the fact that people from more, let's say, affluent upbringings have richer anecdotal deposits from which they can mine, but where's the fun in that? Instead, I want to track my own personal chronology with bolognese, and how that caused me to branch out in all sorts of (chaotic) directions. Think of an aerial photograph of a river's tributaries, and you'll probably have a good visual metaphor for my own development. How did I go from cooking for utility to viewing food as something worthy of prose?
Making bolognese for the first time broke down a few barriers for me. Prior to that, I had an image of cooking as a science governed by strict precision; you must use the right combination of ingredients in the right quantities to achieve the result you want. Actually going through the process allowed me to appreciate how flexible and instinctual preparing a meal. Although my mother was (and, still is) very much concerned with how to budget, the taste of the finished product was still an important factor. This meant, you could actually sample the food as it cooked, a very alien notion to me at the time. You could even add in an ingredient that wasn't on the printed recipe sheet if you had the urge to; it felt like a revolution.
It took cooking this a few times to see the formula in a classic flow-chart style. You fry the vegetables, you cook the ground beef (or, alternatively turkey if we were feeling financially leaner), you add the tomatoes, you season and you wait. Nowadays, I'm not so inclined to see the cooking process as a sequence of inputs leading to the finished product. However, when you're younger, having that basic blueprint to making a meal is incredibly helpful. Bolognese turned out to be the gateway preparation into other types of food, such as curry or chilli. I remember being amazed by how such a similar process could produce dishes of such diverse tastes.
That kind of cooking was firmly in my canon throughout my teenage years. I remember being sixteen and inviting my then-first boyfriend over when my parents had gone away for the week, and making spaghetti bolognese for him. Although this featured a malfunctioning electric can opener (I had to use a kitchen knife in the end), it felt unspeakably adult to invite someone over for a home-cooked meal. Of course I lit candles and dimmed the lights, it being still a dominant cultural trope of the age.
I'm not sure what happened, but around the time I went to university I begun to scorn the spaghetti bolognese as if it were something that wasn't particularly authentic. I know, coming from someone who will happily wrap a Mars bar in a tortilla wrap and microwave it, that seems beyond the pale. It's not as if my tiny student kitchen was a veritable forge of bona fide Italian cuisine*, but suddenly my inaugural pasta sauce seemed basic. Though this was an undoubtedly loathsome attitude to hold, the other side of it was curiosity; I wanted to try making things that I'd never heard of previously, and when things such as laksa and kalops were popping up, there was less room for the bolognese. Becoming a vegetarian in my third year didn't do much to rehabilitate it's tarnished status, either.
In the roughly four years (no, surely not?) between then and now, I've wholeheartedly embraced foods that might have previously been considered basic, yet I never really thought to make bolognese. A vegetarian diet didn't lend itself to making a pasta sauce where the primary flavour is, in fact, the meat. This had been the case until about a couple of months ago (let's be real - listening to the Spilled Milk episode about bolognese got me thinking) when I remembered that varieties with lentils (or other replacements) also exist. The problem is, where does the savoury taste come from? In the UK, we make the tomato flavour a lot more prominent than it is in Italian or American preparations, ironic given how bad our tomatoes are reputed to be. That's not really what I wanted to do here either; I wanted something that would not quite replicate, but resemble the meatier variety.
Needless to say, I now make this differently to my 11 year old incarnation. For starters, we never used carrot and celery (I can't bring myself to refer to this as "mirepoix") in the initial preparation, but I've been won over by the aromatic base that such simple ingredients provide. More importantly, where does the savoury taste come from? Although my parents make their bolognese with the tomato at the forefront, my mother likes to add light soy sauce to hers (I augmented this slightly and use dark). I also add splashes of balsamic vinegar and fish sauce for a touch of the oft-vaunted umami; if you're wondering why I'll justify fish sauce and not ground beef, I wrote about this kind of thing here! At it's core, this dish is an exemplar of the need for balance, so I add some lemon juice for a touch of acid too.
I think it's important to say too, before I plough straight into a recipe, that bolognese is very much forged by individual preference, and I think it is a great template to explore the effect that different ingredients will have on the end product. This is probably why it was such an ideal foray into cooking for the first time. This is a recipe that can be totally stripped down too, if circumstances (or, even, preferences) necessitate this. You could, in theory, cook lentils in a couple of cans of tomatoes and a bit of vegetable stock and serve with pasta. Therein lies the utility, and the other ingredients represent the pleasure and are contingent on the inhabitants of your store-cupboards.
Go-To Lentil Bolognese
Preparation time: 25 minutes
Cooking time: 40 minutes
Serves: 3-4
Ingredients
1 medium brown onion, finely diced
2 medium carrots, coarsely grated
2 celery stalks, finely diced
5 cloves of garlic, crushed and minced
1/4 tsp of dried chilli flakes
250g of chestnut mushrooms, quartered
150g of green lentils
1 tbsp of unsalted butter
2 x 400g cans of chopped tomatoes
200ml of vegetable stock
50ml of full-fat milk
1 tsp of regular or vegetarian fish sauce
1 tsp of dark soy sauce
1 tsp of tomato puree
1/2 tsp of lemon juice
1 tsp of balsamic vinegar
1 tsp of ground paprika
1 tbsp of fresh basil, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp of salt
1 1/2 tsp of sugar
1 tsp of double cream (strictly optional)
Method
Melt the butter over a medium heat in a large saucepan or wok. When the butter has melted, turn the heat up to a medium-high and add the onion, carrot and celery (referred to otherwise as the mirepoix, if you really must). Saute for 4 minutes, until slightly softened and then add the garlic and the chilli flakes, cooking for an additional 1 minute. Add the mushrooms into the pan and stir them through the mix, before cooking for 2 more minutes.
Add the tomatoes, tomato puree, vegetable stock, milk, fish sauce, soy sauce, lemon juice and balsamic vinegar to the pan and stir until combined completely (it may be helpful to measure these all in to one receptacle before you start cooking). Add the lentils, turn on to a high heat and bring to the boil. Once this has come to a boil, turn the heat down to a medium low and add in the paprika, bay leaves, salt and sugar and stir through, before simmering uncovered for 30 minutes, stirring approximately every 5 minutes.
After 30 minutes, taste the recipe to check the seasoning and adjust as necessary, as well as checking that the lentils have cooked through. When everything is to your liking, add the basil and the cream (if using) and cook on a medium low heat for an extra two minutes.
Remove the bay leaves, and serve with pasta or polenta (or anything else you might be partial to).
A note on pasta
Hi, it's me again! Persistent as ever. I'm not going to be so prescriptive as to give you a recipe here, but I want to let you know what I do with the pasta I serve the bolognese with. It's super quick and it really makes a difference as an accompaniment.
I like to use some form of long pasta for this. Ideally it would be linguine or perhaps tripoline if it's available (this time around, it was spaghetti) - you can use any pasta you have a preference for.
I cook the pasta as per the instructions on the pack (I think al dente works best here) before draining away the water, and adding in a couple of teaspoons of olive oil as well as a sprinkling of salt and black pepper. I stir this through, before adding a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg. This gives the pasta a very subtle woodiness that is only just perceptible against the flavourful bolognese. You can experiment with this too, but I would recommend not adding in anything to the pasta that will be particularly dominant.
Notes & Adjustments
*Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the word "cuisine"? I don't have a clue why, it just rubs me up the wrong way, not unlike the word "mirepoix".
One thing you might have noticed as anomalous about this recipe is that I don't use wine. Although I did consider buying a bottle, we don't really have any wine drinkers in my flat and I felt that it might be wasteful to do so if we weren't going to drink it. You can add in a tbsp of wine (there is a whole debate about whether to use red or white that I haven't waded into) but I would recommend halving the amount of balsamic vinegar if you do.
If you want to make this vegan, then use olive or vegetable oil instead of butter, use vegetarian fish sauce (if you can find it - if not, add a tsp of light soy sauce), soya milk in place of dairy and soya cream at the end if you should choose to do so.
Some recipe writers use MSG to create a savoury taste within bolognese, which I almost certainly would have done if I had any to hand (we have, tragically, run short). If you do have any in your store cupboards, you can add in a 1/4 of a teaspoon.
For the lentils, you could use brown or puy lentils in place of the green if that's what you have. I don't recommend using red lentils, as they don't really keep their structural integrity through the process of cooking. You could use tinned lentils; these won't need to be cooked for nearly as long, but they probably won't hold their shape as well.
I had an idea while I was preparing the... mirepoix, that it would be interesting to replace the celery with fennel. The addition of fennel seeds adds an interesting dimension to tomato-based sauces, so it did make me wonder whether the anise flavour it provides would work well here. Alas, I had no fennel (it's a very purposeful purchase, I find), but if you do have any and are feeling experimental then do feel free to try!
If you don't like mushrooms, then you could leave them out. Perhaps add a sliced red pepper just to bulk the dish out a bit more if you are to do this? Regarding the type of mushroom too, I think chestnut works well and is widely available, and plain white ones would be good too. There is also a variety of mushroom called "forestiere" mushrooms that are delicious, but I think they're exclusive to Tesco. Don't go out of your way to pick up a pack, but if you do shop there then perhaps keep an eye out.
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