According to a translation by Patrick Faas, it incorporated dates, honey, vinegar, garum (a fish sauce), passum (a dessert wine), and spices such as pepper, mint, roast cumin, and celery seed.

A Ragu for made Dishes TAKE claret, gravy, sweet-herbs, and savory spice, toss up in it lamb-stones (i.e. lamb's testicles), cock's-combs, boiled, blanched, and sliced, with sliced sweet-meats, oysters, mushrooms, truffles, and Murrell thicken these with brown butter; use it when called for.To make a Ragu of Pigs-Ears TAKE a quantity of pigs-ears, and boil them in one half wine and the other water; cut them in small pieces, then brown a little butter, and put them in, and a pretty deal of gravy, two anchovies, an eschalot or two, a little mustard, and some slices of lemon, some salt and nutmeg: stew all these together, and shake it up thick.

Garnish the dish with barberries.In his 19th-century culinary dictionary, Alexandre Dumas credits ragouts with making "the ancient French cuisine shine".

[4] In Robert Burns' "Address to a Haggis" (1786), the poet suggests nobody could possibly choose French ragout when presented with the titular delicacy.

In the novel Pride and Prejudice, the character Mr. Hurst reacts with disdain when Elizabeth Bennet opts for a "plain dish" instead of a ragout at dinner.