Instructions: True ragu is a magnificent pasta sauce, a slow-simmered blend of meat, tomatoes and, usually, milk. The real thing takes hours, for the meat must become tender and contribute its silkiness to the sauce, the tomatoes must dissolve and the milk must pull the whole thing together.

But a reasonable approximation of ragu can be produced using ground beef or pork or, even better, prepared Italian sausage. Using ground meat is a shortcut to the tenderness traditionally achieved through slow cooking, and sausage has the added advantage of being pre-seasoned, usually with garlic, fennel and perhaps a hint of an herb or two. With tomato paste in place of whole tomatoes, the cooking time after browning the meat is negligible. In fact, this becomes one of those sauces that you can start and finish in the time it takes to boil a pot of water and cook pasta in it, and its lovely rose color and deep flavor belie the amount of labor invested.

In Emilia-Romagna, ragus place of origin, it is almost invariably served over fresh egg pasta. But the sauce is also excellent over dried pasta, especially cut pasta of unusual shapes like twists, bells or bow ties.

There are a couple of options here. For added complexity, reduce a cup of dry white wine in the meat-onion mixture until it is almost dry before adding the tomato paste and milk. (There are conflicting reports as to whether this is traditional, and the difference is subtle, but if the wine is already open, its worth it.) If you prefer plain ground beef to sausage, it still will produce a good sauce, but it is best if the meat has a fairly high fat content, up around

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