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Fettuccine with bolognese sauce

Bolognese sauce (ragù alla bolognese in Italian, also known by its French name sauce bolognaise) is a meat based sauce for pasta originating in Bologna, Italy. Bolognese sauce is sometimes taken to be a tomato sauce but authentic recipes have only a very small amount of tomato, perhaps a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste.

The people of Bologna traditionally serve their famous ragù with freshly made tagliatelle (tagliatelle alla bolognese). Less traditionally, the sauce is served with rigatoni or used as the stuffing for lasagne or cannelloni.

The recipe issued in 1982 by the Bolognese delegation of Accademia Italiana della Cucina confines the ingredients to beef, pancetta, onions, carrots, celery, tomato paste, meat broth, white wine, and milk. However, different recipes, far from the Bolognese tradition, make use of chopped pork, chicken or goose liver along with the beef or veal for variety, or use butter with olive oil. Prosciutto, mortadella, or porcini fresh mushrooms may be added to the soffritto to enrich the sauce.

Heston Blumenthal's BBC series "In Search of Perfection," which features Blumenthal reinventing staple foods of the British diet, had once provided a 45 minute analysis of bolognaise, visiting Bologna and neighbouring towns in search of the most typifying example of the dish. His culminating recipe was based on two principles: the richness of the sauce, whilst retaining the British interpretation of the dish "like mum would make it". This included some unconventional ingredients, including pork, garlic, Worcester sauce, nam pla (thai fermented fish sauce, but both of these ingredients have a degree of authenticity if it is considered that they are related to Roman garum), and tarragon. He stewed the sauce for 4 hours, and used butter instead of cream to "finish" the sauce.

Spaghetti alla Bolognese.

Spaghetti alla Bolognese, Spaghetti Bolognese, or Spaghetti Bolognaise in a form popular outside of Italy, consists of a meat sauce served on a bed of spaghetti with a good sprinkling of grated Parmigiano cheese.

In recent decades, the dish has become very popular in Sweden and Denmark as spagetti och köttfärssås, in Swedish, and spaghetti og kødsovs in Danish, especially among children. It is also popular in the United Kingdom (where it is colloquially abbreviated to spag bol or spag bog) and has become a staple of the British dinner table. In the United States as well, the term 'bolognese' is often applied to a tomato-and-ground-beef sauce that bears little resemblance to ragù served in Bologna.

Chinese people often use the term "Western zhajiang mian" to refer to spaghetti bolognese, alluding to its superficial similarities with the traditional Chinese noodle dish of zhajiang mian as both are dry noodles covered with a thick ragù mainly made of minced meat. This provides an interesting symmetrical perspective to Westerners referring to zhajiang mian as "Chinese spaghetti".

• Neapolitan ragù

• Kaspar, Lynne Rossetto (1st Edition: September 21, 1992) The Splendid Table: Recipes from Emilia-Romagna, the Heartland of Northern Italian Food, Morrow Cookbooks. ISBN 0-688-08963-1
• Elaborate version of authentic Tagliatelle con Ragù alla Bolognese
• Bolognese Sauce with Meat and tomato – Ragù, a recipe adapted from Marcella Hazan’s book Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.
• Tagliatelle al ragù (Italian), a recipe from ItalianPasta.net which includes a bay leaf.
• Bolognese Pasta Sauce From Italian Food @ BellaOnline.com
• Tagliatelle alla Bolognese From italianchef.com