Organ Meats

Organ meats, or offal (frattaglie), such as trotters, tongue, tripe, and sweetbreads have held an important place in Italian cuisine throughout history, in part because the more desirable cuts were reserved for the elite, while those who raised the animals for slaughter made do with what was left over.

But offal was not disdained by the wealthy. In his Opera written in 1570, Bartolomeo Scappi includes numerous recipes for offal, including sweetbreads, kidneys, liver, brains, tongue, cow’s udder, and calf’s head. His recipes are not limited to beef and veal; one entry is entitled “To prepare every cut—that is, every part—of a goat and chamois”; he also recommends methods for cooking pig’s head, as well as the head of a wild boar. In an earlier work, Libro de Arte Coquinaria (The Art of Cooking), the fifteenth-century Renaissance cookbook author Maestro Martino of Como also offers recipes for offal: Mutton’s head is poached and boned; veal and kid sweetbreads are made into an egg-rich “pottage.” And several centuries later, Pellegrino Artusi proposes recipes for beef tongue, goose liver, kidneys, tripe, sweetbreads, and “Lamb’s Liver and Offal Bolognese Style,” among other delicacies, in his cookbook La Scienza in Cucina e L’Arte di Mangiar Bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well).