—Fabiana Geomangio
We were in
Rosciano, our hamlet in Umbria, at a dinner party when we were first offered
tidy rectangles of toast topped with a dark brown paste that had a delicately
pungent, liver-like taste. Informed that they were called ‘Crostini di
milza’, we happily munched
on them on several other occasions in Umbria and Tuscany before actually
remembering to look milza
up (this was back in the pre-internet era). We discovered that it meant
‘spleen’.
Spleen! Isn’t that
the organ of ill temper, the one that one must periodically vent?
Must I observe
you? must I stand and crouch
Under your
testy humour? By the gods
You shall
digest the venom of your spleen.
—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Even in awfully
offal-ly France, where the thymus gland of the calf (ris de veau) is one of the stars in the gourmet
constellation, you never see spleen (rate) in a butcher’s or on a menu, or at least we never
have. Of course there is the great Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris, but you wouldn’t want to eat that,
either:
“Nothing is as
tedious as the limping days,
When snowdrifts
yearly cover all the ways,
And ennui, sour
fruit of incurious gloom,
Assumes control
of fate’s immortal loom”
But spleen is not
all bad. In traditional Chinese medicine, one of its functions is to house the yi (thinking). It governs pondering—something
Baudelaire might have held a world record for. In Greek, the language that gave
us the English word ‘spleen’, people who are good hearted are ‘good-spleened’.
And the Greeks eat their share: lamb’s spleen is one of the organs in the
Easter dish, kokoretsi,
braided into intestines and grilled on a spit (kukurek in Macedonian, kokoreç in Turkish). In southern Italy, in fact,
they makes something similar, be it marro (Puglia), cazzmarr (Marche and Basilicata) or cazzamarro (Calabria), among other names.
Other regions of
Italy partake as well. In Trentino, they use spleen to make gnochetti with greens, garlic, bone marrow and
egg. In Alto Adige they make milzschnittensuppe (beef broth poured over spleen-covered crostini). And Rome's Jewish community makes milza
di bue in padella (sautéed
ox spleen).
But it’s in Sicily
where spleen triumphs in Italy as soul food, especially in Palermo, where the
locals are said to have learned their love of spleen (or meusa as it’s known there) from the city’s
Jewish butchers, who slaughtered the animals in the Vucciria market, and were
paid in offal instead of money. To turn it into cash, they set up stands along
the street, boiling and frying the sliced spleen, or stuffing it in rolls.
Today it’s called 'pan cà meusa' and served with a squeeze of lemon, ricotta and grated caciocavallo cheese.
For first time spleen eaters, though, you
may want to stick with Tuscany and Umbrian crostini di milza. If you can get the spleen, it’s easy to make with butter, red
onions, nutmeg and anchovy paste and a food processor: Marco Tomaselli reveals
all in this short video:
