Here’s a neat idea for a really quick and savory pasta whenever you happen to be cooking a roast veal, chicken, beef or pork: Save the drippings and use them as a sauce for taglierini pasta—a sugo d’arrosto. It’s that simple.

If your roasting pan is flameproof, you can even throw your pasta right into the pan. Otherwise, deglaze and scrape up the sucs from your roasting pan (together with the fat and any bits and pieces of meat and vegetables if you like) then save it for your pasta. Gently heat up your sugo d’arrosto in a skillet and add your cooked pasta, and mix well over low heat, adding some of the pasta water to help coat the pasta. with the sauce. Depending on the roast, you may want to mix in or top with a little grated parmesan cheese.

For this dinner, I used the all juices and bits and pieces of pancetta, chicken and rosemary left over from the pollo in porchetta I had made the previous evening. It was so tasty on its own that it didn’t need or want cheese.

Notes

This sauce, which hails from the Piemonte region, where it is also called tocco d’arrosto, meaning literally a ‘touch of the roast’. It is typically used to dress taglierini (known as tajarin in Piemontese dialect) as picture above, but it is lovely also with tagliatelle or even to dress stuffed pasta like agnolotti. Almost any fresh egg pasta would probably do, as would even a ‘factory’ pasta like rigatoni. If you want an elegant dish, you can strain the sauce through a sieve, but personally I really like all the bits and pieces.

If you haven’t made a roast, Marcella Hazan offers an alternative recipe in her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. It calls for making a ‘mock’ sugo d’arrosto—which for some reason she calls a butter and rosemary sauce—by sautéing a sprig of rosemary and a few garlic cloves in butter and then melting a beef bouillon cube into the resulting sauce for your taglierini. It’s not bad at all, although obviously second best to using real sucs from a roast.

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