Morzello

Morzello is the great dish of the quinto quarto — the «fifth quarter», the offal left once a carcass has been divided into four — long disdained by the well-off and so left to the poor, who in Catanzaro made it the city's emblematic food. Until recent decades the old town had its morzeddhari, keepers of small taverns called putiche, who from around nine or ten in the morning sold pitte filled with morzello to labourers and farmhands on their morning break. A popular tale credits its invention to a poor servant girl who, sent to clean a slaughter yard, carried home the discarded offal and stewed it with tomato and herbs; this is told as legend rather than record. The name is most often traced to the Latin morsus, a bite or mouthful, fitting a food eaten in bites from a pitta; other accounts derive it from the Catanzaro dialect morzha morzha, «into little pieces», or from the Spanish almuerzo, a mid-morning meal.

Morzello is rich, dark and fiercely spicy, the sauce stained deep red and slick with the fat rendered from the offal. The textures are the whole point and they vary: tripe is springy and faintly chewy, lung soft and spongy, heart firm and meaty, liver tender and minerally; spleen and the rest melt into the background. Behind the considerable chilli heat are the savour of long-cooked innards, the sweet depth of reduced tomato and the herbal lift of bay and oregano. Well made, the offal is clean-tasting and fully tender with no rubberiness or off note; poorly cleaned or under-cooked, it turns tough, and the iron tang of liver and the muskiness of the inner cuts can run rank rather than savoury.

Offal is the most demanding meat to handle, and morzello is built on getting it right. Tripe and the other inner cuts must first be scrupulously cleaned and then boiled at length — several hours — to break down their tough connective tissue and to drive off the strong, musky compounds that make raw offal unpleasant; only then are they cut up and stewed. The long second simmer in the tomato-and-chilli sauce, often as much again, finishes the job: collagen in the tougher pieces continues to convert to gelatin, the textures settle, and the offal takes on the sauce while giving back its own savour and fat. The heavy dose of Calabrian chilli is not only for fire but works with the acidity of the tomato to cut the richness and mask any lingering offal pungency; the bay and oregano do the same aromatic work.