It’s funny what you think you know. For the last thirty-five years I’ve been cooking chicken scarpariello – or shoemakers’ chicken — for my family. It’s one of my kids’ favorite dishes out of my humble repertoire – cut up pieces of chicken, still on the bone, flash-fried with garlic, white wine and rosemary. The best way to eat this dish is with your fingers, mopping up the sauce with a piece of good Italian bread. It’s heaven on a plate. I first came across the recipe in Alfredo Viazzi’s cookbook. Alfredo had a restaurant – he had a few of them, actually – in Greenwich Village where we lived in 1972. We ate at Trattoria d’Alfredo a couple times a week, often spotting James Beard at a table by himself, packing away Alfredo’s fabulous food.
Imagine my shock when I researched the recipe on the Internet and found that it’s not Italian at all. I typed in “pollo allo scarpariello – ricette” on Google, so that I could pull up the recipes in the original Italian and I came up empty. They don’t have that dish in Italy or, if they do, they call it something else.
It turns out that chicken scarpariello is an Italian-American dish, created most probably in New York, New Jersey or Providence around the turn of the century when so many Italian immigrants came over from the south of Italy. There are, however, hundreds of recipes on line – in Italian – for pasta scarpariello – all coming from the area in and around Naples.
It’s a simple recipe of pasta – penne or spaghetti or rigatoni – in a sauce of fresh tomatoes, garlic, basil and a little hot pepper, covered generously with a combination of grated parmigiano and pecorino cheeses. There are many theories about the derivation of the name scarpariello, the most obvious being that the dish was created in the neighborhood in Naples where the all the shoemakers’ shops used to be.
But the theory that appeals to me – and what connects this pasta dish to the shoemakers’ chicken I’ve been making all these years – comes from the expression “fare la scarpetta,” which means, literally, “to make the shoe.” It refers to the practice of tearing off a hunk of crusty bread, making an indentation with your thumb so that the bread is shaped like a little shoe and then using it to mop up the sauce that’s left on your plate – fare la scarpetta, an Italian tradition.
So, what pasta scarpariello and chicken scarpariello have in common – even though they were conceived on different continents — is a great sauce left on the plate — so they should be always accompanied by a nice hunk of Italian bread.
Allora. (Okay now.) Le ricette (The recipes):
PASTA ALLO SCARPARIELLO
The traditional pasta dish. (serves 6 as a first course)
Spaghetti (or penne or rigatoni) – I lb.
Fresh cherry tomatoes – 2 lbs. — slice off the root ends and halve. (You can substitute larger tomatoes, peeled and cut up into filetti di pomodoro)
2-3 cloves of garlic – sliced thin
hot pepper flakes (optional)
olive oil – 6 tbsps
a nice handful of grated cheese (a mixture of parmigiano and pecorino)
6-8 basil leaves – sliced into thin strips
Put on a large pot of water to boil. When it’s reached a rolling boil, salt generously and add the pasta. Stir. In the meantime, heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat and add the sliced garlic. When it begins to turn golden, add hot pepper to taste and all the tomatoes. Add salt. Turn up the flame and blister the tomatoes until they just begin to fall apart and lose their shape. Then turn the flame low. When the pasta is perfectly al dente, drain it and add to the sauce. Gently toss with spoons or forks, slowly incorporating the pasta into the sauce. Add the basil and toss again. Serve with the grated cheese.
Michael Tucker's version.
CHICKEN SCARPARIELLO
(A note: there are many, many versions of this dish –some with lemon(?) some with peppers, some with onions, etc. This is my version, which includes sausage. I think it’s the best.)
Serves six:
Chicken pieces with skin and bone still attached – I use thighs and breasts – using a cleaver, I halve the thighs and cut each breast-half into three pieces. Four half breasts and six thighs will be 24 pieces – that should be plenty. Salt and pepper the chicken
Four sweet Italian sausages – I boil them first; then cut them into bite-size slices and hold
Olive oil for frying – 1 ¼ cups
Garlic – three cloves, chopped fine
Rosemary – 3 tablespoons fresh
White wine – 1 ½ to 2 cups
Butter – about a tablespoon and a half
Salt and pepper
Italian bread
Heat the oil in a large skillet over a three-quarter flame and fry the chicken pieces in batches until just done. Set aside on a plate. Put the sausage into the pan and put a little char on it. Set aside with the chicken. Then add the garlic – being careful not to let it burn. When it’s just golden, add the wine, the rosemary and the butter and turn the heat up to high. Scrape up all the tasty bits from the pan and incorporate them into the sauce and boil it down until it thickens a bit. Taste for salt. Then add the chicken and sausage; turn them in the sauce so that everything gets well coated and serve. Don’t forget the bread to make your little “shoe”.
Michael Tucker is an actor and author whose third book is the recently published Family Meals: Coming Together to Care for an Aging Parent