The Tuscan Sun Cookbook: Recipes from Our Italian Kitchen / Frances Mayes, Edward Mayes

Featured Recipe: Giusi's Ragù

Slow and easy--long-simmered ragù is the quintessential Tuscan soul food. There are as many ways with ragù as there are cooks. This is ours, learned originally from Giusi, who's made it a thousand times. By now, I think we have, too. On many Saturday mornings, Ed makes a huge pot of ragù--tripling, quadrupling the recipe--and another of tomato sauce. We consider these our natural resources. For lunch, while the pots are still on the stove, we spoon ragù over bruschetta, add some cheese, and run it under the broiler. By afternoon, we're ready to fill several glass containers of different sizes and freeze them. We're then free to pull one out during the workweek. Serve ragù in lasagne or over spaghetti and, as you eat, you know you're participating in a communal rite that's being enacted all over the Italian peninsula.

Serves 10

• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 pound ground lean beef
• 1 pound ground pork
• 2 Italian sausages, casings removed
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon pepper
• 2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves or 1 teaspoon dried
• 1 to 2 cups red wine
• 1 cup soffritto (recipe below)
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 16 to 20 tomatoes or 2 28-ounce cans whole tomatoes, juice included, chopped

Pour the olive oil into a 4-quart heavy pot with a lid. Over medium-high heat, brown the meats, breaking up the sausage with a wooden spoon, about 10 minutes. Add the salt, pepper, thyme, and 1 cup of the red wine. After the wine has cooked into the meat, about 10 minutes, add the soffritto, and stir in the tomato paste and tomatoes.

Bring the sauce to a boil, and then lower to a quiet simmer. Partially cover, and continue cooking for 3 hours, stirring now and then. Along the way, add the remaining cup of wine if you think the sauce is too dense.

Soffritto

Serves 10

• ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 yellow onion, minced
• 1 carrot, minced
• 1 celery stalk, minced
• 1 handful of flat-leaf parsley, minced
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ¼ teaspoon pepper

Saute the ingredients in a small saucepan over medium-low heat until they begin to color and turn tender, 5 to 7 minutes.