Stigghiola: Sicilian Grilled Lamb Intestines
Almost the whole Mediterranean has some dish made of lamb intestine, and almost everywhere the same rule applies: the intestine is the wrapper. Inside go liver, heart, lungs, sometimes rice, and the gut only holds it all together on the spit. Sicily read the rule differently. It left out the filling, kept the wrapper and built a stall around it.
Stigghiola is cleaned lamb or kid intestine, wound around a spring onion and parsley, grilled over charcoal and served with nothing but salt and lemon - a street classic of Sicilian cooking. No filling, no sauce, no bread - a piece of gut that made a name for itself.
The Gut That Stands on Its Own
Stigghiola gets its name from Latin, from a diminutive for innards, and I go into it in more detail in the piece on the veal version. More interesting is what they call the same dish in Messina: tajuni, which comes from digiuno, fasting. It doesn't refer to the hungry customer, but to the empty end of the gut the dish is made from. A greasy late-night treat named after fasting is about the most Sicilian pun I know. Grilled intestine isn't just a Palermo thing, it's an island-wide affair: they grill it in Catania, in Agrigento and in Messina too, it's just that Palermo shouts about it the loudest. Across the water you run into the branch of the family that does have a filling: Apulian gnummareddi are little rolls of offal wrapped in gut, Greek kokoretsi winds intestine around a whole bundle of organs and roasts it for hours on the spit, and kokoreç from Turkish cooking is chopped up after grilling and stuffed into a bread roll. Of these three cousins, Sicilian stigghiola is the only one that left out the inside.
Shepherds, Calves and a Few Folk Verses
Stigghiola belongs to the cooking of the fifth quarter, quinto quarto - to everything left over after the slaughter once the better cuts had gone to better people: head, trotters, offal. The same source gave Palermo its spleen sandwich, pani câ meusa. The oldest written mention comes from folk verses from 1876, and it mentions the intestine without saying whose it was. Nobody doubts the original ingredient: shepherds kept sheep and goats, so lamb and kid is the first version and veal is a detour that came later.
Onion Inside, Smoke Outside
The flavor is in the gut. Barely any seasoning goes into it. The intestine has to be split open, washed and stripped of its fat in lemon water, and only then is it wound around a bundle of spring onion and parsley. Nothing holds it, no skewer; the winding alone holds it together, and only the finished bundle goes onto the communal grill. The onion inside turns sweet over the coals and the gut around it takes on a crisp crust from the fat and the heat, exactly the crust you came for.
Stigghiola is a dish of the evening and the night. You don't find the seller's stall, the stigghiularu, by a sign, but by the smoke drifting down the alley, and in Palermo this dish has never paid for any other advertising. Lamb intestine is grilled mainly from autumn to spring, the season when Sicily eats lamb at all; in summer you're more likely to find veal on the grill, thicker, longer and on a skewer. It's eaten hot, straight off the fire, out of paper or off a plate, and nothing gets scattered over it that would drown out the smoke. It doesn't go into a bread roll the way it does in Turkey. The gut takes lemon and salt and wants nothing more.
After Midnight at the Vucciria
I ate stigghiola in Palermo at the Vucciria market (see Where to Eat in Palermo), after midnight, when all that was left of the old meat market was a square full of people, smoke and music. The intestines had charred stripes from the grill along their edges, the crust crackled and inside the meat was soft, with a richness the lemon kept in check; the onion in the middle was sweet and softer than everything around it. A portion came to about 5 EUR. The whole Mediterranean stuffs intestine with offal and turns it into a wrapper. At the Vucciria after midnight I missed neither the filling nor the bread roll.
