Most flavor words with food and drink are shifting, arbitrary signifiers (more so than language in general, I think). It’s kind of the same with medicine—it’s where metrics like a “pain scale” came from originally, trying to situate or ground what a patient is saying about the intensity of pain they’re feeling. People who judge or evaluate food and drink have tried to professionalize, standardize or otherwise form implicit agreements about what a conventionalized evaluative or descriptive vocabulary means when they say it. But for that to work, it has to make some kind of evocative sense to people who want to read and be informed by food writing.
So when I say that this sauce was meant to be “light” and “bright”, what does it mean? And what does it mean that my partner said those very words to me before I prompted them? (Well, it meant that I was pleased, because it was what I wanted.) Comparatively, many other ragu would be “heavy”, “full”, “intense”, and I think mostly if I said to you “that’s what you’re getting”, you’d know what I meant and you’d likely know in advance whether you were in the mood for that.
Some of it is about the density of the sauce, its thickness. If you want it tasting “lighter”, you stop cooking it while it’s got more water in it, where the tastes are diffused more. Not too much: at some point what we think of as “sauce” flashes over into being “soup” and our entire expectation of what it means to eat it changes at that point.
It’s also about the difference between what flavors chicken thighs and their bones give up as they cook compared to beef short ribs or a pork or lamb shoulder. The things we associate with “meatiness” are mapped to “heavy”; even thighs, which have more intrinsic flavor than chicken breasts or wings, are never going to get to “heavy” in that sense no matter how you cook them. The point where they’d be “heavy” in terms of time is the point where they’d be entirely tasteless, which is how some people historically have eaten chicken—as a neutral protein that is the fleshy equivalent of tofu, a mirror of what it is cooked within. “Light” means (to me at least) that a braise or a sauce is retaining some of the distinctive flavor of its sponsoring protein. Using chicken stock in this sauce is a way of cheating in that respect, but that’s ok. Chicken livers were more of a risk, because many people taste them as muddy or ‘dirty’ but in this case running them through a food mill got their ‘lighter’ flavor in the sauce without that other taste.
There’s flavors to toss in that I think lift a sauce towards “light” and “bright”. So I stuck with the idea of putting a few chopped black olives and some lemon in at the end. I did a whole peel of lemon rather than zest so it influenced the sauce rather than being in every bite. More pronounced acid makes things taste “lighter” in many people’s intuitive food vocabularies.
I left the peas and the mushrooms out: I think they would have been confusing or pulled in other directions.
The sauce itself will get better over several days of just sitting in the fridge—I might use it for some baked polenta squares mid-week with a bit of blue cheese on top or something along those lines.
I am glad you held back on some ingredients you were thinking of adding. You mentioned bacon as one. It was excellent and I think now chicken thighs is my favorite preparation of ragu over other heavier meats.