Genovese – pasta with onion and meat sauce

The story of ’a genovese

’A genovese is a Neapolitan white ragù: lots of onion and beef, without tomato, cooked over the lowest heat for many hours until the onion turns into a cream. In Neapolitan this slow simmering is called “pippiare”. It is used to dress ziti broken by hand; the meat is often eaten separately, as a main course. No such dish exists in Genoa.

So why is it called genovese? Nobody knows for certain. The most widely cited theories speak of Genoese cooks or merchants in the inns of the port of Naples, or of a Neapolitan cook nicknamed “’o Genovese”. The anthropologist Marino Niola recalls that in the Middle Ages “where there was pasta, there was the name of Genoa”. None of these explanations has been proven.

There are a few written traces. A medieval recipe collection from the Naples area, the “Liber de coquina”, already contains a Genoese-style “tria” with onions. In nineteenth-century recipe books, pasta “of Genoa” and pasta “of Naples” still appear side by side; then their paths part, and in the twentieth century the genovese takes on more onions while ragù turns red with tomato.

The traditional onion is the ramata di Montoro, sweet and aromatic, which Slow Food has included in its Ark of Taste precisely for its use in the genovese.