A friend’s son is off to university, expecting to cook for himself for the first time. “What’s the best thing to give him?" she wonders. “A wok? A set of Sabatier knives? An account at Gourmet Burger Kitchen?” How about a fool-proof recipe for spag bog, that reliable filler of hungry stomachs?

It’s simple, cheap — you can do it for £1 a head (raising or lowering the mince content according to current fiscal strength) — and not without a whiff of Italian style. It was my first successful grown-up dish and one of just two recipes in my wife’s repertoire until she was 30.

Spag bog arrived in Britain’s kitchens in the 1970s: I suppose it became bog, or bol, because we were nervous about fitting our tongues around the word bolognaise. Or was that bolognese? With an extra syllable? We still can’t get it right — on my daughter’s school menu last week it was spelt bologanaise.

In fact there are two classic, quite different sauces. The encyclopaedia Larousse Gastronomique is firm about this. First, alla bolognese, a ragu in the style of Bologna. This is a sauce of ground meat, a little tomato and beef stock, carrot, onion and celery, milk and chicken or goose livers — served not on spaghetti but with tagliatelle or lasagne. Then there is the French refinement of it, sauce bolognaise, which derives from the period in the 19th century when the French got keen on things Italian, especially those they could lift. By the 1950s this was an item on the menus of “continental” restaurants in London.

In 1966 there was a daring dish in the new edition of Constance Spry, confusingly called “Spaghetti a la Bolognese”. This used poultry liver, no mince, a “dash of sherry” and a mere tablespoon of reduced tomato. It doesn’t sound a crowd pleaser. But out of such misconceptions arose a British sauce: bog. Early bog was cheap, fatty beef mince, tinned tomato and fried onion, with a bit of dried oregano and half a glass of Bull’s Blood if you were flash. It was all chucked in the pot and boiled until quite sad.

If we served it on spaghetti that was because the only alternative was macaroni, which was strictly for use with white sauce and a little cheddar. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard now to find a recipe for this 1970s staple in a modern British-Italian cookbook. But a good bog is a glorious thing. It is very easy to turn it from something drab and school-mealish to something so good your student will eat the leftovers on toast for breakfast.

Here some tips for a better bog. Try using a range of different tomatoes, especially the over-ripe ones you can find on special offer now in the supermarket. Add tomato purée or tomato ketchup. You can roast the fresh tomatoes in the oven till they’re browning first. Fry the onion and garlic with some fatty smoked bacon or old salami until it is nearly caramelised. Add a couple of mashed anchovies or a parmesan heel with the tomatoes for even more taste. Use the best mince (beef, pork or lamb) that you can afford. A good glug or two of wine is crucial; an Italian would use a muscular white, not red. Let the sauce simmer, lid partly off, for a couple of hours, so it reduces. (A traditional Italian ragu will stew for six to eight hours.) Season it with chilli, Worcester Sauce or, even better, some smoked paprika.

Key to a traditional spag bog is lots of grated cheese, though if you make it as above you won’t need quite so much flavour enhancement. The cheese must be fresh. Grated Cheddar is better than the dried baby-vomit Parmesan in a tub that soured so many 20th-century childhoods. If there’s one other thing you can give your departing student, teach them to cook the spag, or the tag, properly. Al dente is not a mere lifestyle choice, it is a creed by which we all should live.

alex.renton@thetimes.co.uk

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