Tagliatelle al Ragù

There is no spaghetti bolognese in Bologna. The city's chamber of commerce keeps the official ragù recipe on file — deposited by the Accademia Italiana della Cucina in 1982 — and the proper vehicle for it sealed in a glass case: a golden replica of the perfect tagliatella, eight millimeters wide cooked, equal to the 12,270th part of the height of the Asinelli tower. Bologna does not joke about this. Bologna does not entirely not joke about this either.

The ragù itself is a lesson in restraint: beef and pancetta, soffritto, a little tomato — far less than the world believes — white wine, milk, and hours. It is a meat sauce, not a tomato sauce; the eggs in the pasta and the milk in the pot do more work than the pomodoro.

The tagliatelle must be sfoglia — egg dough rolled out by hand with a mattarello until the sheet is thin enough to see the marble through — then cut loose and dressed while still steaming, so the porous hand-rolled surface drinks the sauce. At Sfoglia Rina on Day 3, the sfogline work in the window: flour, eggs, forearms, nothing else.