Neapolitan ragù

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Neapolitan ragù (ragù napoletano in Italian) is one of the two most famous varieties of meat sauces called ragù. (The other one is the renowned Bolognese sauce popular worldwide.) It is a speciality of Naples, as its name indicates.

Like its equivalent in Bologna, the Neapolitan type is also made from three main parts: a soffritto, meat, and tomato sauce. However, a major difference is how the meats are used. Bolognese version uses very finely chopped meat, while the Neapolitan version uses whole meat, taking it from the casserole when cooked and serving it as a second course or with pasta. Also, the soffritto contains much more onion compared to the Bolognese. Preferences for ingredients also differ. In Naples, white wine is replaced by red wine, butter by lard, parsley with lots of basil leaves. Of course, mortadella is absent in the Neapolitan recipe, while the content may well be enriched with adding raisins, pine nuts, and involtini with different fillings. Milk or cream is not used, and a relative abundance of tomato sauce in flavour, in contrast to Bolognese taste, is preferred. Like the Bolognese, Neapolitan ragù also has quite a wide range of variants, the most well-known of which is ragù guardaporta (doorman's ragù).

It is interesting to note that Bolognese sauce (or, more often, a kind of tomato-and-ground-beef sauce named this way) is used outside Italy for spaghetti, a dry southern pasta, although it is used with tagliatelle, which is fresh, inside of Italy. The kind of ragù used with pasta types like spaghetti, bucatini, and ziti is the Neapolitan one.

Neapolitan ragù is very similar to and may be ancestral to the Italian-American "Sunday gravy".