Or Three Sauces, and this is what you'll get with your bigoli (thick-stranded pasta) if you order them in a traditional eatery in the Veneto: Tomato Sauce, Peas, a Tomatoless Meat Sauce, and you sauce your pasta as you see fit, adding grated cheese to taste. It can be very nice!
The meat sauce, you wonder? If the restaurant is very traditional it will be made from rovinazzi, or chicken giblets:
2/3 pound (300 g) chicken giblets (gizzards, cockscombs, hearts, and livers)
A sprig of fresh sage
A sprig of fresh rosemary
1/2 cup (100 g) unsalted butter
1 cup (50 g) freshly grated Grana Padano or Parmigiano Reggiano
Salt
Clean and wash the gizzards.
Bring a small pot of water to boil, salt it lightly, and simmer them for 10 minutes. Remove them from the water with a slotted spoon, and dice them finely.
Use a needle to prick the cockscombs and boil them for 5 minutes. Drain them, skin them, and chop them.
Wash the hearts and livers under cold running water, removing filaments and fat, and all traces of bile (greenish spots on the livers). Chop the hearts, and crumble the livers with your fingers.
Heat the butter with the sage and rosemary, and when it begins to crackle add the chopped gizzards, cockscombs and hearts, and simmer for about 15 minutes over a low flame.
Remove the herbs, add the livers, season to taste, and cook, stirring, over a brisk flame for about 3 minutes.
It's done!
Serve your bigoli (figure 3/4 pound, or about 320 g for 4 people, and time the cooking so they will be done when the sauce is), with the giblet sauce, tomato sauce, peas, and grated cheese on the side for those who want it. The wine? Red, and Valopicella will be perfect.
Comments
This is a dish I have not tried, but it looks delicious.
It is good, and never quite the same.
I love bigoli and have had it with the chicken giblets but I’ve never had it served like this with 3 sauces, sounds interesting.
We spent three weeks in the Veneto in June and while we didn’t see this three-sauce option for bigoli, we did enjoy bigoli all’anatra (with duck sauce) several times.
I have some Czech ancestry from my mother’s side. As a child, when visiting relatives from the old country, chicken gizzards, hearts and livers were available as comestible. One time when I was 11 years old, I ate a dozen gizzards at one sitting. Altho I had eaten gizzards before that gluttonous time, I have never eaten gizzards again since that time. I often make Kosher-style chopped chicken liver pate. I never tried cockcomb.