Name: Ravioli: Meat Sauce (Tocco Genovese)
Yield: Serves 10–15 as a starter or 5–7 as a main
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: 500 ml beef stock; 400 g tinned tomatoes; 1 tablespoon flour; 50 g butter; a grating of nutmeg; 10 g dried porcini, soaked in 100 ml boiling water then chopped; 1 stick celery, chopped; 50 g bone marrow (diced, or 40 g extra butter); 1 onion, chopped; 1 carrot, chopped; 1 tablespoon chopped flat-leaf parsley; 2 bay leaves; 500 g braising beef or veal (brisket, shin or flank), cut into large chunks; 3 cloves; 150 ml white wine

Preparation info

Serves
10–15
as a starter

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

The Geometry of Pasta

By Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy

Published 2010

About

This dish is one of elegance and economy. Tocco (or toccu) is the classic Ligurian meat sauce: made much like ragù Napoletano in that it is the tomato sauce in which meat was cooked. Here, the flavour is deepened with mushrooms, and the sauce thickened with a roux — demonstrative of the French influence in the far western corner of Italy. The joy of the dish is that the meat from making the tocco is used to fill the ravioli. Not