Suffrit’
Giovanna Bellia la marca’s recipe
Dear Friends,
As I join the conversation, I assume that you are talking about what the English collectively call the Offal and the Italians refer to as The Fifth Quarter: the innards of the animal.
We as Italians have never had the luxury of being finicky about eating meat. We always ate the butchered animal snout to tail, not only did we eat all parts of the animal, but we made them delicious.
The Soffritto, which is basic to many sauces and dishes, is onion, celery and carrots fried in olive oil, butter and olive oil, butter, or lard depending on the region. Sometimes garlic was added to the trio of aromatic vegetables. The Italian name of soffritto varies in regional dialects.
For decades we went to Italy almost every summer, but the first time I was able to go at Easter time it was to have some of the foods associated with that holiday. In Ragusa, Sicily which is my birth city, the specialties are: ‘Mpanata, which is a savory pie made of lamb meat seasoned with parsley, garlic, salt and black pepper.
The other traditional specially in something called Turciniuna (Involtini) in which a piece of tripe is stuffed with the innards of the lamb: slices of heart, liver, lung, flavored with scallion, parsley and a slice of caciocavallo, salt and pepper, shaped into a roll, and held together with the gut of the animal which is opened and scrubbed clean with lemon and salt. The rolls are placed in a pan and baked. This is the Sicilian version of a very special dish which cannot be duplicated in the U.S. because lung is not sold here.
The brain was blanched, sliced, dipped in batter and fried. The tongue was just boiled and served with a green sauce. The kidneys were cooked in wine and served with the pan juices. The sweetbreads are delicious blanched, and deep fried.
Of course, the other thing that many of us were raised on or remember our grandparents eating was lamb’s heads or Cappuzzelle, which are still available at the Arthur Avenue Market in The Bronx. My mother boiled them, then separated the two halves covered them with a flour, water and salt paste and pan fried them the give the outside some crunch and possibly to hide the eyes. There was little to eat, but they were wonderful morsels; the brain, the tongue and the cheeks.
After having lost all the friends and family who loved tripe, I now have a group of friends who will come over anytime I promise tripe which I make in a light tomato sauce with peas and a shower of grated Pecorino or Parmigiano. Since tripe in an acquired taste, I make chicken for my half Irish husband.
Enjoy our traditional dishes and Buon Appetito.
Nancy Carnevale’s mother’s recipe
My mom uses liver and heart; in Italy, they add lungs, but apparently that’s illegal here. She cuts them up into very small pieces and sautee’s them in a little oil. She gets rid of the excess liquid and puts them aside. Then, you sautee’ small pieces of onion, garlic, red pepper, parsley (tiny–you barely see them once they are cooked) in a little olive oil with salt and pepper. Then add the innards and sautee’ some more. They come out dark, almost carmelized. I ate an entire frying pan of this the other night. Few things remind me more of home. Tiziana reminded me that I should specify–we only use lamb innards, never chicken. Go figure.
Tiziana’s mother’s recipe