The 30-minute sauce you can serve with anything (like crispy white beans)

We're making white bean scarpariello!

Jackson (that’s my boyfriend) has brought many things into my life: Gary Indiana, Percival Everett, Saint Etienne, “Control” by Playboy Carti, at least a partial understanding of the word dialectic. Last year we added chicken scarpariello to that list, which I’d never had before, never even heard of. Jackson had become obsessed with it, an Italian-American chicken-and-sausage dish with a spicy sauce of slouchy, pickle-y peppers. We made it once and I thought it was just fine: the sausage, cut into chunks, came out a little dry, and the sauce I wanted to tinker with a bit. Tasty but nothing to write home about. Every few weeks Jackson would bring it up while we brainstormed dinner. And I’d say well maybe something else for tonight?

The name translates to shoemaker’s chicken, the implication being that even a lowly shoemaker could afford to feed this to his family. Now, with supermarket inflation and all that, it’s not the cheapest thing to make—four chicken thighs and a handful of sausages, a jar of pickled peppers? It’s no lamb shoulder but it’s not what I’d necessarily call a budget Tuesday dinner.

So fuck with it I did, because I wanted to find a version of this sauce that I loved, and a cheaper protein to top it with. I took a few cues from Ali Slagle’s smoky white beans and cauliflower: crispy white beans tossed with paprika, though I pan-fried mine, and a canopy of vinegar-dressed parsley. I wanted layers, I wanted texture, I wanted brightness, I wanted a diminutive grocery bill and you know what that’s what I got.

I’ve made this a few times now, and I’m pleased with how legitimately weeknight-friendly it is, how versatile the sauce becomes when divorced from a braise. If you’re a fast slicer you can make this in 30 minutes, and you’ll still have an aggressively flavorful sauce: sweet from peppers, spicy and tangy, with that rich wine-and-stock combo that goes so well with a big side of bread. I added a spoonful of fennel seeds up top to suggest sausage without calling for it, though you could easily sear an Italian link or two before you get cooking and then add it to the pot with the stock.

Aside from its peppery vibrancy, the beauty of this particular scarpariello sauce is its structure: loose enough to feel like a sauce, sturdy enough to double as a vegetable. I keep my peppers sliced, not chopped, so they retain a bit of shape and don’t just turn into a pile of confetti mush in the bowl. The recipe, as written, is my ideal version of “healthy comfort food,” and/but can also expand in about ten different directions. After a lunch of it the other day Jackson asked would this be good on fish and I realized, yes this would be amazing on fish actually, the sauce spooned over a nice white fish you’d pan-seared or steamed or roasted. Leftover sauce would be wonderful on a roast beef sandwich. Of course you could serve it over chicken—now I am dreaming of a scarpariello-inflected chicken parm??—but it would also get friendly with a pork chop and some boiled potatoes. Shrimp????!? Give it a try, maybe you have some in the freezer.

Scarpariello, then, is part recipe, part sweet-sour suggestion. Play around with my version until you feel like it’s yours.

White Bean Scarpariello

Serves 2-3; easily doubles