Cooking a cow, month by month - Mince

Learn how to cook perfect mince

Fancy cuts like sirloin are all very well. But it’s important, every so often, to remind ourselves that most of the meat on a bullock is fit only for braising. Mince gets too much of a bad press.

Read the US Department of Agriculture’s ‘safety tips’ for ground beef and you’d think they were talking about uranium. (The best way to handle it after you’ve bought it?

‘Enclose it in a plastic bag so that any juices that do leak out won’t contaminate other items in your grocery cart.’) Then there’s the issue of what’s actually in it, though this is less of a concern if you buy it from a reputable butcher.

What you can’t escape is mince’s overbearing fattiness. The first dish I ever learned to cook involved mince. It was spaghetti bolognese. My mother showed me how to make it before I left home for university.

‘You’ll be able to make it for your friends,’ she said. But I didn’t – only the weird selfcatered, and anyway, there wasn’t room in my life for cooking as well as writing glib essays, overacting in bad plays and failing to pluck up the courage to ask out Nicola Usborne, who was in the year above me.

I’ve made mince a lot since, though. In fact, I probably make it once a fortnight. The recipe I use is broadly similar to my mother’s, except that – and this amazes me now – she didn’t put any wine in it.

Everyone knows that wine is essential to a good ragu. It adds depth and texture and other abstract nouns. Plus you can sip the ‘cooking’ wine while you work, reassuring yourself that, far from exhibiting alcoholic tendencies, you are ‘making sure it’s okay to cook with’.

HOW TO COOK IT

Bolognese sauce: Fry onion and chopped garlic on medium heat until soft. Add 500g mince and cook until brown.

Add salt and pepper; a squirt of tomato puree; one tsp of oregano; one tsp of thyme; two bay leaves. Cook for another five minutes.

Add a tin of plum tomatoes, then a generous glass of red wine and a spoonful of soft brown sugar. Simmer for half an hour.

John O’Connell Buy your meat at Boucherie Michel, First Floor, Jiezuo Building, Xingfucun Zhong Lu, Chaoyang district (6417 0489). Open 9am-8.30pm daily.