A Spleen Well-Lived

A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.

My students—their entire lives lived in a classroom—are skeptical when I say lifelong learning is the way I know I am alive. Learning means trying new things. Taste life, I tell them.

On holiday, I collect cuisines the way other people collect souvenirs. I carry them around on my waistline.

After a tour of Sicily, I am fat with juicy lesson plan ideas for educating my students about Roman history. If I can turn off a few stomachs, maybe I can turn on a few minds.

The island of Sicily is existentially a combination delicatessen, pasta factory, pastry shop and fish market. If you’re not raising food, harvesting food, cooking food, serving food, then you are a food tourist. In Sicily—closer to Tunisia than Rome—medina-to-mouth recipes are on every menu.

As I will explain to my students, in Palermo pani ca meusa is cow spleen mixed with bits of lung. Slow-simmered, then reheated in hot lard and folded into a crunchy sesame roll with white Caciocavallo cheese and a lemon wedge. The texture is soft and smooth, floppy and sloppy, like a thick, unwieldy slice of bologna. The taste, not unlike a mild pot roast, compares favorably with venison, wild boar, warthog or crocodile.

The Belaro street market is on the city’s southside. Dilapidated buildings loom over narrow alleys. Electrical wiring entangles rusted balconies. Laundry hangs helter-skelter like triumphant soccer flags after a game win. People are elbow-to-elbow carrying vegetables, fresh fish, household items in straining, stretchy string bags. A motorcycle repair shop invades a sidewalk. Hawkers shout out invitations to sample their wares. My eyes and nose can’t escape the eat-me-now sights and smells.

On large grills billowing with bluish-black smoke, stigghiola sizzles. Grilled lamb guts, tightly wrapped in a leek, form a tube that looks like a large earthworm. I devour them doused with olive oil and lemon juice, poking at the one-inch, cylindrical morsels with a small wood skewer. My first thought is of mopane worms, but the taste is subtler, more refined, delicate and richer—and much juicer.

Arancini are rice balls stuffed with ragu meat sauce, cheese and green peas, then coated with breadcrumbs and deep fat fried. One fist-sized arancini is a meal, prefect for eating while I gesture with my hands, Italian-style.

Under the guise of introducing my students to other cultures, I enjoy grossing them out with my atypical fast-food cravings. The crescendo of groans of disgust, feigned and otherwise, are my secret guilty pleasure.

For a sweeter bit of history, I’ll wrap up my lecture at Saint Catherine church. For 700 years, nuns here have supported their convent by keeping alive a confectionary and bakery. In a cloister shaded by lemon trees and converted into a courtyard, a cannolo and I share a bench beside a gurgling fountain.

Not a minute ago, right in front of me, a nun stuffed a fried pastry shell with sweetened ricotta made from sheep's milk. Then she topped it off with candied fruit, chopped pistachios and chocolate bits. The first bite is a religious revelation. Swooning, supplicating, I commit my life to the Great Cannoli.

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