A ragout is a French meat stew, while ragu is the meat sauce the Bolognese use for seasoning their homemade pasta. If using tinned tomatoes: use a 400g tin, and start the recipe at the above step. Add the butter, onion, salt and sugar, and cook at a slow but steady simmer, uncovered, for 45 minutes. Puree the tomatoes through a mouli-legumes back into the pan. Simmer in a covered stockpot or saucepan for 10 minutes. It is an unsurpassed sauce for potato gnocchi, and it is excellent with spaghetti, penne and ziti. What does it have? Pure, sweet tomato taste, at its most appealing. Except for salt and a tiny amount of sugar, the sauce has no seasonings. The onion is not sautéed, it is not chopped, it is only cut in two and cooked together with the tomato. It has no other vegetables, except an onion. This is the simplest and freshest of all tomato sauces. These moments come around rarely enough, so I recommend adopting a hero who can cook. When your hero knocks, or says come to lunch, Florida is not far away. A little homage from your hero is a giddy mouthful indeed. This was pasta you could have eaten for ever, except we were halted by the arrival of two shapely braised veal shins. We started with a fresh pasta that had wild mushrooms and roughly chopped spinach running through it. There I was, eating canapes and drinking with her husband, Victor, and herself. Then I was embracing Marcella … I was in Marcella’s flat … And it smelled fantastically of cooking. We found ourselves outside her front door, someone had rung the bell, and I suddenly felt like turning on my heels and running. I must admit I was a little surprised by her home, a high-rise gated community, but this seemed to be the favoured school of architecture along this coastline. I stayed in a hotel that felt like the sort of place in which the Mob would take their summer holidays, just down from where she lived. Why was I quibbling? Marcella had offered to cook pasta for me. Florida is not round the corner, but strangely it seemed to get closer and closer daily, until the point that it really seemed to be just round the corner. A letter duly returned thanking me, and saying that I must come to Florida to eat her pasta or risotto. To me, this was akin to writing a blurb on the Bible.
When Marcella published her autobiography a few years ago, I received a note from her asking me to write something on the back cover.
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