was meat sauce invented in Italy?

Question

If so, is it more common in America or Italy?

Answer 1

I've heard meat sauce refered to as "Bolognese" meaning it comes from the Bologna region of Italy.

Answer 2

The soulful simmer
Long, slow cooking makes luscious ragùs that are as varied as Italy's regions.
By Carolynn Carreño, Special to The Times
October 27, 2004

About 15 years ago, traveling along the Italian Riviera, I'd had all I could take of the brave new Italian foods I had just discovered: walnut cream sauce and sun-dried tomatoes and gnocchi and fresh mozzarella. (Well, they were new to me, anyway.) I wanted something hearty. So as I sat one evening in a cafe in Genoa, I chucked any notions I had of being a culinary sophisticate and asked the waiter if, per favore, I might have a bowl of pasta alla Bolognese.

That was it. "You-a in Genoa!" the man screamed, arms flailing in the air. "In Genoa, you getta pasta Genovese. You want pasta Bolognese, you go to Bologna!"
What I wanted, of course, was meat sauce. But what I didn't know is that the word for meat sauce in Italy is ragù. Bolognese, the proper name of which is ragù alla Bolognese, means ragù of Bologna. Regional pride being what it is in Italy, the request I'd made was a bit like going to a friend's house for dinner and asking the mother to please make her meatloaf like my mother's.

The word ragù comes from the French word for stew — ragoût — which in turn comes from the verb ragoûter, meaning to stimulate the appetite. And indeed it does. Ragù is not a specific sauce, but rather any meat sauce cooked long and slowly, until the meat is meltingly tender and the sauce — infused with the meat's juices — is luscious and rich. You use it to sauce pasta, gnocchi, polenta — or even risotto.

And every region has its version. In Trieste, ground beef ragù is redolent of fresh thyme and marjoram. In Abruzzi, ragù is often made with lamb, and on the island of Sardinia, wild boar is the standard meat used for a tomato-based ragù. Did you think ragù was just a brand of sauce in a jar? There is one that sort of looks like that: ragù alla Napoletana. In this version, large chunks of meat — beef, pork, veal or a combination — are cooked in tomato sauce and, traditionally, removed from the sauce and served as a second course.

Even if I had gone to Bologna for my meat sauce, as the waiter suggested, I wouldn't have recognized the Bolognese I would have been served there. While "Bolognese" is undoubtedly the most popular ragù in this country, it is also the most misunderstood. The ragù you get by that name is usually a characterless tomato sauce with pea-like bits of ground beef floating in it, bearing little resemblance to anything you'd find in Bologna. And not, in any sense, a ragù.

True ragù alla Bolognese contains no tomato sauce — just enough fresh or canned tomato to add a hint of sweetness and another layer of flavor to a subtle, complex mix. Like all ragùs, Bolognese is characterized by its long, slow cooking, which in this case starts with simmering the meat in milk (to mellow the acidity of the raw tomatoes added later) and wine (some use white, others red), after which the tomatoes are added. The whole lot is cooked together for about two hours, at what Marcella Hazan calls "the laziest of simmers" in her book "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking."

Answer 3

I think it is more common in America.

Answer 4

more common in america.