on the sidechicken riggies

An Italian-American pasta dish from the Utica–Rome area of New York: chicken, rigatoni, and hot or sweet peppers in a spicy cream-and-tomato sauce. Variations are many; the peppers and the rigatoni are the constants.

Its origin is unclear, and many chefs from the Utica area claim the dish.

Inference — that sentence is the same sentence upstate New York keeps writing about its own food. A hundred miles west, three Bellissimo accounts and one John Young compete over a wing; here a dozen Utica kitchens compete over a pasta, and in neither case does a document settle it. What both traditions do instead is hold contests.

Brown chicken, build a sauce of tomato and cream, and load it with peppers — cherry peppers for heat, sweet peppers for the other way. Toss through rigatoni, whose ridges and bore hold a sauce that thin-walled pasta would shed.

Served across the Utica–Rome corridor as a restaurant staple and a home dish. Tradition holds — riggies, greens and half-moons are the three things a Utica table names as its own.