Ah, Sicily. Incredible landscapes, blazing sunshine and some of the freshest fish and seafood around. The Italian island is a tourist hotspot, with travellers flocking to its cities, beaches and mountains to soak up the local culture. But while the restaurants serve glistening sardines lightly cured in local lemon juice and bountiful plates of pasta alla norma, the street food vendors of Sicily tend to specialise in something more robust. Often cloaked in a column of dark, billowing smoke, they can usually be located by their shouting, the queue of locals waiting to order and the unmistakably smell of grilled meat. Don’t expect sausages, burgers and steaks, though – on Sicily, the majority of the meat dishes served are made with offal.
The city of Palermo, in particular, is famous for its offal dishes. You’ll find them being sold on the streets surrounding its vast food markets, rapidly being cooked and prepared by chefs who have been cooking the same delicacy every day for years. This is authentic – some would say visceral – fast food, and while there are a few branches of McDonalds on the island, nearly all the locals would take a spleen sandwich over a Big Mac any day.
This tradition of eating offal was started by Sicily’s medieval Jewish and Muslim communities, who would eat it in place of pork. Due to the expulsion of Muslims by Frederick II in the thirteenth century and the expulsion of Jews in the fifteenth century due to the Spanish Inquisition, these communities unfortunately no longer exist (although they are beginning to grow again in modern times). However, their legacy of eating offal remained.
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The street food of Sicily: guts and all