October 8, 2021
Unappetizing pictures!
Sometimes really delicious food makes unappetizing pictures.
Take Chicken Scarpariello, for example. By the time the chicken is unctuous, the potatoes creamy, and the sauce tangy the dish is unappetizingly brown (at least in a photograph). I discovered this when looking at the photographs I had taken for this blog post.
This is really a shame because the taste is superb.
Brown food can be challenging to photograph, especially brown food in a brown sauce. Food stylists might solve this problem by using barely cooked potatoes that look pale and peppers that are still yellow and green, not really cooked as required by the dish. This doesn’t represent reality. The dish, cooked properly, will never look like the photograph. This is an approach that I think is inherently unfair.
I’m willing to admit that some of the problem relates to my picture-taking ability. My photographic ability isn’t great but even that meager ability sometimes suffers because I’m hastily taking photographs as I’m trying to put the food on the table.
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If I weren’t doing that, I could carefully plate a piece of chicken with the potatoes and peppers artfully arranged off to the side, lots of white space on the plate, and a few colorful garnishes or side dishes. I could even wipe a little of the sauce off of the potatoes to make them lighter in color. All this would mitigate the “brown problem” but it just isn’t practical because the food I post on the blog is something that I actually made to eat at the moment it is ready.
I guess I could spend time carefully taking pictures and serve cold food but that approach wouldn’t last long in my household.
I could cook specifically for the blog and not worry about serving the food, at least not the day I cook it. That would create a major leftover problem. Besides, many dishes aren’t at their best when reheated. On the other hand, many foods are better if made in advance. So, I guess this is a partial solution to the problem that could work on a case-by-case basis depending on what the dish is.
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I can think of other potential solutions but each has its problem. This could include having a photographer arrange the plate and photograph it (presumably while I’m having dinner with the rest of the household).
Alternatively, I could serve everyone then spend time arranging a plate to photograph, hoping to join the dinner table before everyone is finished.
I’ll keep working on a fix to the issue but, in the meantime, I encourage you to try this Italian-American dish. It scales up easily so you can feed a crowd if you need to. The leftovers are pretty incredible, too!
American websites, including the New York Times, usually say the name of this dish translates as Chicken Shoemaker Style. However, you won’t find the word “scarpariello” in an Italian dictionary. To be sure, the word “scarpa” means shoe but the Italian word for shoemaker is “calzolaio.” Scarpariello, however, is the word for shoemaker in the Neapolitan dialect, which gives a clue as to which immigrant group might have been responsible for creating this Italian-American favorite.
| Prep Time | 30 minutes |
| Cook Time | 2 1/2 hours |
| Servings |
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- 9 chicken thighs skin on and bone in
- 3 Italian sausage links approximately 12 ounces, hot or sweet as desired
- flour for dredging
- 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
- 2 1/2 pounds potatoes peeled
- 3 Bell peppers red or yellow
- 1 1/2 large onion
- 12 cloves garlic smashed
- 3 sprigs rosemary
- 3 bay leaves preferably fresh
- oregano to taste
- 9 ounces white wine
- 3/8 cup wine vinegar white or red
- 1 cup chicken broth plus more as needed
- 1 1/2 cup pickled peppers such as banana peppers or peperoncini, hot or sweet as desired
- 1 1/2 cups marinated artichoke hearts drained
- 2 tablespoons capers drained (optional)
- 3/8 cup chopped parsley
- salt to taste
- black pepper freshly ground, to taste
Ingredients
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- Dredge the chicken in flour. Reserve.
- Peel the potaotes and cut in large chunks.
- Cut the Bell peppers in triangles
- Cut the onions in eighths
- In a large stove-to-oven pot, heat the olive oil. Brown the chicken, sausage, and potatoes. Do this in batches, if necessary.
- Remove everything from the pot. Cut the cooked sausage into 1 ½ inch long pieces.
- Add the garlic to the oil remaining in the pot and sauté until it is fragrant and golden.
- Add the bell pepper and onion, season with salt, and sauté until the onion is beginning to soften and turns gold and brown in spots.
- Add the rosemary and bay leaves and sauté briefly.
- Add the wine and deglaze.
- When wine is almost completely evaporated, return chicken, sausage, and potatoes to the pot along with any accumulated juices.
- Add about 1 cup of chicken broth and the vinegar along with the pickled peppers. Season well with salt, pepper, and oregano.
- Bring to a boil, cover, and put in the oven at 350°F.
- An hour later, stir the contents of the pot. Add the drained artichoke hearts and capers, if using. Add more broth if needed to keep the contents from sticking. Adjust the seasoning.
- Cook for another hour until chicken is very tender and potatoes are cooked through.
- Stir in parsley and serve.
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