
Like a lot of people I know, I returned from my first trip to Italy in 1993 determined to teach myself how to cook. The eating in Florence, where Andy was “studying” art for the summer, was so revelatory that I didn’t waste a whole lot of time once the wheels touched down Stateside. On the way home from the airport, I stopped by our local bookstore and found my friend Matt behind the counter. I asked if he could recommend a good Italian cookbook that might offer even just a hint of what I had just experienced across the Atlantic. As far as I know, Matt never cooked a thing in his life, but he will forever hold a special place in my heart because he handed me The Classic Italian Cookbook, by Marcella Hazan, and, with the understatement of the decade, told me, “People seem to really like her.”
The name was familiar — Andy’s Aunt Patty had already introduced us to Marcella’s milk-braised pork loin — so I plunked down my five bucks for the mass market-y looking paperback, started flipping through it, and for almost twenty years have not stopped. That’s probably why the book, held together by masking tape, now looks like this:

It’s sort of like looking at Luca Bear, my daughter’s dingy teddy-bear lovey with the frayed bowtie that she has been sleeping with since she was 13 months. One look at him and you know that thing has been on the receiving end of some serious love.
The summer I first bought CIC, I tried out a few of the recognizable recipes — Tomato Sauce 1, Tomato Cream Sauce, Blender Pesto — making some real knucklehead comments in the margin as I went along. “Too garlicky” I wrote after adding three cloves of garlic to a tomato sauce that didn’t call for any garlic at all. Improvising with a Marcella recipe, I’ve since learned, is not something one does, unless one does not want to learn how to cook. You make the dish exactly the way she tells you to. In a nod to her shortcut-obsessed American audience, her headnotes are studded with phrases like “if you insist” and “if you are so inclined” (Fettucine with Gorgonzola Sauce: “You can try substituting domestic gorgonzola or other blue cheeses, if you are so inclined, but you will never achieve the perfectly balanced texture and flavor of this sauce with any cheese but choice Italian gorgonzola”), but the effect is the opposite of liberating. It makes you desperate to not disappoint her. (There are also many less passive instructions such as this one, under Mayonnaise: “I can’t imagine anyone with a serious interest in food using anything but homemade mayonnaise.”) The ingredients she uses in her recipes are all basic staples of any kitchen — butter, ground beef, salt, onions — which means that in order to yield the kinds of dishes that have earned her exalted status in the food world, it is absolutely imperative that you do not deviate from what’s written. For Hazan, who was trained as a biologist and went on to teach cooking classes in her New York apartment, it’s all about technique. When I do what I am told (literally leveling off two tablespoons of chopped onions), not only do I find myself with insanely delicious dinners I’d be proud to serve to Grandmas Turano and Catrino, but I find myself a little smarter in the kitchen. Her bolognese, which you are looking at above, was the first Hazan recipe that we fell in love with for this reason. “It must be cooked in milk before the tomatoes are added,” she wrote. “This keeps the meat creamier and sweeter tasting.” And then: “It must cook at the merest simmer for a long, long time. The minimum is 3 1/2 hours; 5 is better.” We, of course, always do five.

Meat Sauce, Bolognese Style
From The Classic Italian Cookbook, by Marcella Hazan
We made it last week with fettucini, but Marcella — and any Italian — will tell you that tagliatelle is traditional. Because the sauce can be made ahead of time, it makes an excellent dish to serve dinner guests.
2 tablespoons chopped yellow onion
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons chopped celery
2 tablespoons chopped carrot
3/4 pound ground lean beef
salt
1 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup whole milk
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
2 cups canned whole tomatoes, chopped, with their juice
1. In a Dutch Oven or large heavy pot, add the onion with the oil and butter and saute briefly over medium heat until translucent. Add the celery and carrot and cook for 2 minutes.
2. Add the ground beef, crumbling it in the pot with a fork. Add 1 teaspoon salt, stir, and cook only until the meat has lost its red, raw color. Add the wine, turn the heat up to medium high, and cook, stirring occasionally, until all the wine has evaporated.
3. Turn the heat down to medium, add the milk and the nutmeg, and cook until the milk has evaporated. Stir frequently.
4. When the milk has evaporated, add the tomatoes and stir thoroughly. When the tomatoes have started to bubble, turn the heat down until the sauce cooks at the laziest simmer, just an occasional bubble. Cook, uncovered, for a minimum of 3 1/2 to 4 hours, stirring occasionally.
Serve with tagliatelle.
Just made this recipe for my toughest critic and he loved it! Thanks for a great recipe!
I have made this recipe so many times. There is just nothing else quite like it. @Laura – yes you have to use the milk! It softens the meat and gives the sauce a wonderful consistency.
I made this last night and it was Auh-MZING! Thank you!
Made this last night. Divine. I ate about a third of it straight from the pot and my husband devoured the rest when he got home late from work. So I think there is an error in how many it serves. 😉 (And we never even made it to the 3 1/2 hr mark!)
5 hours and yes, I deviated…. used 2% milk and added a little more milk and tomato juice at the end because it seemed a little dry. Everyone loved it all the same.
I have been hoarding amazon.com gift certificates from Christmas and my birthday and I just ordered a Le Creuset dutch oven and this book, can’t wait to try them out!
Just a warning, the recipe from Essentials is different from the one in Classic. It calls for a lot more vegetable matter and is in my opinion not as good.
Could you follow steps 1-4 and then transfer to a crockpot to finish it for the 5 hours?
Just to add… I bought this book (used and with yellowed pages, haha) the day after you posted this entry. I made the Pasta e Fagioli soup in it… um! To die for!
Looking forward to using my new “tool” a whole lot more. Thanks for the suggestion 🙂
Jenny, this is our new “pork ragu” for Sunday nights. We are obsessed with how delicious it is! -Mindy
There is a mistake in the recipe. The milk should be done first, then the wine. According to Marcella, the milk coats the meat to protect it from the acidity of the wine and the tomatoes.
After the milk has evaporated all away, then you grate the nutmeg, THEN you add the wine.
How long does it take for the wine to evaporate in step 2? How long should I cook it before moving on to step 3? Thanks!
Could you address Joe’s comment from May 26? He said the recipe has an error….that the milk should be added (cooked to evaporate) and THEN the wine. Could you please address? Thanks!
Help! I’m five hours into this thing and it seems so fat-heavy. I doubled the recipe and doubled the fat as well. I”m wondering if it’s needed for the pasta or if I should drain some of it off? Any thoughts?
oh no! I started this and didn’t read all the comments! I added wine first then milk. I just checked online at Marcella recipe and it says milk first then wine. Hope it comes out okay… I’ll let you all know in a few hours.
Jenny – I have always made it with ground turkey and my husband, a full on carnivore, is very happy with it. The milk makes the turkey tender and rich.
Made your Lazy Bolognese last night on a very cool late summer evening. Nothing less than amazing! The aroma of fennel seed took me right back to the meat sauce my Mom used to make for us when my siblings and I were kids. It will most certainly be on the regular rotation throughout autumn and winter.
I too wonder which is correct, wine or milk first? I have been making it per Jenny’s instructions and it is wonderful, but I would love to hear which is correct. I also have the problem that when I double this there is WAY too much fat. I tried increasing the cooking time by quite a lot, but it was still too much. Now I use only a little more butter and EVOO when doubling and it works much better.
Joe, Liza, Ohio12 — I typed the recipe word for word from the book (so it’s correct, wine first, then milk) and it has never failed me. Perhaps there was an updated version that she published in another book you are all looking at? Either way, my guess is that you can’t go wrong as long as you follow her instructions. [PS: I only typed this recipe word for word because, being a classic, it exists everywhere online. If it didn’t, I would’ve made sure to ask her permission first.]
I found this because of your end of year post (some good reading there!).
I make Bolognese from another source, but they must have been inspired by Marcella because the ingredients and instructions are virtually identical. The only difference is that they call for 6 ounces ground beef and 6 ounces ground pork. The first time I made it I couldn’t find ground pork, so I used Italian sausage. I dream of this stuff. It is SO good.
I have mine simmering on the stove now, I will post and let everyone know how it went!! I have 3 young children and will let them be the critics…
I made this and it smelled divine but when tasting it it was incredibly salty. I didn’t even add a full TBS per the ingredient list. I am guessing perhaps it was the tomatoes I used…do you use a specific brand? I used canned tomatoes from Trader Joes.
I added a potato to remove the overly-salty taste and now am happy with it. thanks!
Is there a way to substitute or omit the white wine? Thanks!
While it is absolutely true that following Marcella’s recipes exactly will get you wonderful results, I think that she would be the first to admit that the only rules in great Italian cooking are using good ingredients and treating them well (and, perhaps, not using too many of them)! Unlike French food, which is fairly well codified–a dish with a particular name made in one town will be pretty similar to the dish with that name made in a town on the other side of the country–Italian dishes differ town to town and even house to house, precisely because they are so dependent on available ingredients. You can make this ragu, for example, with white wine or red wine or no wine — but don’t expect the results to be the same if you change the ingredients. Who knows, you might like them better?
As soon as I read this post, I came home from work, walked 1.5 miles to Powell’s book store in Portland, and bought Marcella’s “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.” I plan on reading it like a book before bed 🙂