A ragout is meat and vegetables cooked slowly together in a thick, wet sauce — a stew, in simple words. The word came into English from French, so you mostly meet it on menus and in cookbooks; it sounds a little fancy, not like everyday home talk. English speakers still mean the stew. Do not mix it up with Italian ragù: that is usually a meat sauce you put on pasta, the kind in a bolognese. The two words are from the same place, but on the plate they are not the same dish now. You can also meet ragout as a rather old-fashioned verb meaning to cook something this way, but the food sense is the one people use.