Bollito and other boiled dinners Recipe

Some of our favorite Sunday meals during the cold weather months are boiled dinners. I usually make homemade broth in the afternoon and, not wanting anything to go to waste, the boiled meat and vegetables that went into the pot are usually dinner that night.

If you've made the broth with beef, you'll have lesso di manzo, also known as bollito di manzo. (The verbs lessare and bollire both mean 'boil'.) If you've used chicken, pollo lessato. And, if you want to serve one of the great classic dishes of northern Italian cooking, you can try bollito misto--made with beef, chicken or capon, veal breast, veal tongue, and/or calf's head, pig's foot, and one of two sausages originally from Modena, called cotechino and zampone, (often eaten with lentils on New Year's Eve, but that's another story).