Ragù Potentino

The name is pure dialect: 'ndruppeche renders the Italian intoppo or inciampo, a stumble or a snag, for the way a diner keeps meeting pieces of meat in the sauce. This is the Sunday and feast-day ragù of Potenza and its province, built on knife-cut beef muscle and pork rather than mince. Its backbone is the local salame pezzente, the 'beggar's salami' made from humbler cuts, seasoned with dried chilli and fennel and lightly smoked; lamb, rabbit or poultry went in as a farmhouse had them. The long-cooked sauce dressed the region's fresh pasta while the boiled meats followed as a second course, and in winter and at Carnival the plate was finished with freshly grated horseradish, prized in Basilicata as the 'poor man's truffle'.

Each forkful is different, the sauce dark, deep red and glossy, clinging to every twist of the pasta. It tastes long-cooked and profoundly savoury, sweet with tomato and rich from the rendered salame, and where the horseradish has been grated over it a clean, sharp heat rises through the nose and lifts the whole plate.

The meat is cut by knife into chunks, not minced, so it browns on its surfaces while staying in pieces the fork can find; that browning sets up the Maillard reactions that build the sauce's savoury depth. Beef muscle and other collagen-rich cuts need the full three hours of bare simmering to hydrolyse their connective tissue into gelatin, which softens the meat and gives the sauce body. The salame pezzente does double duty: its rendered fat carries flavour through the tomato, while its cure of chilli, fennel and a little smoke seasons the whole pot from within. Horseradish is grated on raw and at the last moment because its pungency comes from volatile isothiocyanates released when the root is cut; heat drives them off, so cooking it would waste the very kick it is added for.