Name: Pasta agli Spinaci con Fegatini (Spinach Pasta with a Grappa-Splashed Chicken Liver Sauce)
Yield: Serves 4 as a first course, 2 to 3 as a main course
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: 10 leaves of fresh sage; 2 medium-size white onions, minced; 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil; 5 ounces chicken or rabbit livers, preferably from organically raised freerange chickens, any greenish areas discarded, cut in eighths; 4 to 5 quarts water; 2 ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped; 10 ounces spinach-flavored spaghetti; ½ cup grappa; ¾ teaspoon salt; 1½ tablespoons coarse salt; Freshly ground black pepper

Preparation info

Serves
4
as a first course

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

In Nonna's Kitchen

By Carol Field

Published 1997

About

If you were traveling in Tuscany today, you might still find spinach pasta with a chicken liver sauce, but in the past and perhaps still in the best of all possible worlds, the pasta would be made with very finely chopped spinach and the sauce would have rabbit livers tossed with local grappa. When I asked Morena Spinelli for her advice in making the dish, she quoted an old saying, “Baccal, fegatina, e uova: più che cuoce, più che rassoda.”; Which is to say: “Salt cod, chicken livers