WHAT THE FUCK DOES A SPLEEN EVEN DO?

And why does it taste like what Tejal Rao calls, "the boiled, grizzly flotsam of a prehistoric monster"?

We’re taking it back. Back to 2017, New Years Eve, Palermo, Sicily. We were actually staying in Sferracavallo, but the spleen I wanted was in Palermo. It was waiting for me on some side street of some night market somewhere in the maze of the old city. Over that way. Off the main drag. You know, where all the people are eating it? Despite my best googling, I couldn’t lock down the exact location of the vastedda, milza, pani ca meusa that I had read about. I couldn’t even pronounce pani ca meusa. I was still a novice. I’m still a novice now. But back then my love for offal wasn’t fully formed, my chops for sniffing it out not all the way there. I had the enthusiasm, the drive, and the curiosity for it, but not the words or the palette. 

Palermo is not a forgiving city. I can’t remember it as anything but poorly lit side streets and the mission for la milza. I’m trying to remember more now. We got lost in alleyways while people lit fireworks at random startling intervals, and we were hungry. Still, I was going to find that spleen sandwich and put it in my mouth, even if I had to abandon my fiancé to do it. This haphazard strut through the city was feeling more and more like an argument with every step we took. The bus stop to Sferracavallo was getting further away in the wrong direction, it was getting late, these Sicilians are scaring me, and what the fuck is a spleen anyway? 

It’s a bag of blood.  

Tejal Rao put it beautifully in the Atlantic 14 years ago, “The spleen is a deep purple bruise caged by the ribs. It deals in blood—sorting, holding, moving—its soft red pulp held by an elastic casing.” 

The spleen filters, freshens, and recycles nutrients from the blood, all while housing important immune-response cells called monocytes. Mostly though, it has a texture. The texture of offal, one of the things that puts so many people off, is what draws me to it. If I ever open a restaurant I’m calling it CHEWY and we’re serving Chewbacca themed leathery food that requires intense mastication. Spleen would be on the menu of course. And though I’ve since had softer, stuffed spleen in Morocco, when we ate it that night in Palermo, the chewiness was undoubtedly intact. 

Spleen looks like an open pea pod with the peas missing. In your mouth it almost feels like well done steak if the steak had cavities and a rib cage. To quote Tejal Rao again, “The crumbly slices have pieces of chew (artery, membrane, anonymous gristle). Comparing things is tricky: spleen is more like meat than most offal I've had, but less like it too.” Reading her words about spleen make this piece feel very close to superfluous but that was her spleen and this was mine. 

We got the milza from a man with a cart and a pot full of mixed offal— spleen, tripe, intestine, and maybe lung. He did not speak English, we did not speak Sicilian, Italian, anything verbal worth attempting. Gestures were expressed, money changed hands, and the spleen was finally acquired. It wasn’t the sandwich I wanted, but it was only 3 euros, and there was a lot of it. Too much in fact. From what I remember, I think we only finished half of the aluminum container, and kept it moving to look for stigghiola— grilled veal intestines seasoned with parsley and onion 

The milza verdict? 

I don’t think I liked it.  

I can’t remember the taste of those particular bites but the texture still rings in my mouth. There definitely wasn’t a resounding yes afterward, or an urge to go out and try it again soon. Which probably explains why I haven’t eaten it again until a week ago. This time it came looking for me. 

I wasn’t in Palermo. I wasn’t even close. It was much further north, in Torino, where I fulfilled my pani ca meusa dream. I was googling “sandwich shops near me” and lo and behold: five minutes away from my location was a Sicilian food “lab” selling the stuff. Detached from Palermo, the sea breeze, and the crowded streets, it felt a little wrong to be eating it there. I ordered wrong too, instead of the vastedda with ricotta I chose the classici with just lemon and pepper. Maybe the spleen needs ricotta, like a liver craves onion, but I won’t know until I try it. And I won’t try it until I’m back in Palermo again.

Some foods evoke a sense of place, some foods need it. Sitting in a manicured take-away box of a restaurant in Torino isn’t quite the same as being hunched over on a plastic stool eating spleen with a toothpick in Sicily’s largest metropolis.  

I have to give you one final quote from Tejal Rao. If you have an Atlantic subscription go read her whole piece about eating pani ca meusa in Brooklyn. Here’s the final paragraph.  

“Like so many culinary relics, pleasure is not its purpose. Vastare, the Latin from which the street snack gets its name, means to lay waste. It suggests an act of devastation. And truly, if the universe were running too smoothly for your liking and you wanted to momentarily obliterate yourself with a sandwich, you could do no better than a vastedda. The spleen inside tastes like the work it did. It leaves the rank taste of blood in your mouth, confirms that you're alive, reminds you that you're meat.”

I hadn’t read her piece before eating the pani ca meusa but I felt the sentiment. The sandwich was too big. Defeated by spleen yet again, I could only finish half of it. I just sat there staring at it and thinking, it’s only a bag of blood. With texture. And ribs. And cavities. 

Just like us.