ragoût

Ragoût (English: ragout) derives from the French verb ragoûter, meaning 'to revive the appetite' or 'to restore the taste' — a compound of re- (again) and a- (toward) plus goût (taste), from Latin gustus (taste). The word goût is related to English 'gusto' and 'disgust,' both from the same Latin root. A ragoût is therefore, etymologically, a dish that re-tastes you — that restores appetite or revives the pleasure of eating. This sense of restoration is shared with the word restaurant (from restaurer, to restore), making ragoût and restaurant distant etymological cousins, both reaching back toward the idea of food as a reviving force.

In classical French cuisine, a ragoût is a slow-cooked stew of meat, vegetables, and aromatics in a thickened sauce — not a broth-based soup, but a thick, cohesive braise. The distinction between a ragoût and a braise is partly technical: in a ragoût, the ingredients are typically cut into pieces; in a braise, the meat is often kept whole or in large pieces. Ragoûts appear throughout the history of French cooking, from the court cuisine of the seventeenth century through Escoffier's codified repertoire. Navarin (lamb with turnips and spring vegetables) and blanquette de veau (white veal ragoût with cream) are canonical examples.

Ragout entered English in the seventeenth century, when French court cuisine was the dominant influence on English aristocratic cooking. The word appeared in English cookbooks and household manuals throughout the eighteenth century, and English cooks adapted French ragoût techniques to British ingredients — English ragouts of rabbit, of oysters, of vegetables appear in period recipe collections. The word was sometimes anglicized in spelling (ragoo, ragou) and sometimes retained its French accent, depending on the affectation of the writer.

By the nineteenth century, ragout in English had settled into a straightforward meaning: a richly seasoned stew of meat and vegetables. It appeared on menus as a marker of French-style cooking and in domestic cookbooks as a technique available to accomplished home cooks. The Italian ragu — the slow meat sauce of Bologna that became the definitive pasta sauce of Emilia-Romagna — is a related word, borrowed from French ragoût and adapted into Italian culinary vocabulary. The ragu Bolognese served over tagliatelle is a direct linguistic and culinary descendant of the French ragoût, reduced from a stew to a sauce by centuries of Italian adaptation.