Pane con la milza- Sicilian spleen sandwich

Ah, spleen. We've all heard about it, been disgusted by it, and for some resourceful farmers in Tompkins, Saskatchewan, predicted the weather with it. According to "Pig Spleen Website", “Environment Canada has thousands of dollars worth of weather instruments and all I have is a $2.00 pig spleen. I can compete with them and better their accuracy.” Gus claimed 80-90% accuracy. Jeff’s (and Gus') spleens are obtained from southwest Saskatchewan for prediction purposes. The forecast is recommended for a 200 mile radius from where the pig was grown."

I mean, can you really argue with the meteorological expertise of Jeff and Gus?

But unfortunately, most spleen-related discussions end when it comes to the topic of actually eating the blood filtering lymph node. In NYC, one would struggle to find even the most hellbent on nose to tail cooking restaurant serving spleen on their menu. However, here at No Frills NYC, we follow a simple rule taught to me by my mother when I was a child: "No matter how the food looks now, once it goes into your stomach, it all looks the same".

This being said, I came across the idea of cooking pork spleen while shopping with my father at Golden City Supermarket, a Chinese supermarket in Flushing, Queens. As we walked through the offal section to pick up our regular pig ears and tongues, a dark shrink-wrapped package of what appeared to be giant leeches stuck out of the sea of kidneys and livers.

Not too appetizing, I'm sure. After bringing this bloody mess home, I embarked on a search on the internet to find a good recipe involving spleen. Not surprisingly, I couldn't find anything at all, save for a few recipes that just involved boiling the crap out of the meat. And that's when I remembered this section of Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods: Sicily:

With no beef spleen or Sicilian cheese available, I decided to improvise.

You'll need:
1) A pack of pork spleen
2) Some sort of grated Italian cheese (I used Trader Joe's Pecorino Romano Grated)
3) Bread
4) A lemon wedge
5) Lard
6) Ginger

The first thing to do is to scrape off the fat at the back of each spleen. Afterwards, put a pot of salted water on the stove top to boil.

When the water starts to boil, plop the spleens in for about 15 minutes, or until they are fully cooked.

Next, cut and flatten some ginger to go in the water with the spleen. This is the Chinese method of cutting the gamy taste out of meat.

After letting them cook all the way through, take the spleens out and cut them into thin slices about the same size as the slices of gyro meat you would see in a shwarma.

All I need in this life of sin, is me and my Chinese cleaver...

Now here comes the fun part. Grab up your lard (I only have bacon fat, scraped from the pan every morning), and use a few spoonfuls to quickly pan fry the spleens for about two minutes each side. Traditionally, this recipe would involve stewing the spleens in lard for hours, but I went with a more conservative approach to maintain the integrity of my unclogged arteries.

Then, pile a generous heaping of spleen on a couple slices of toasted bread, with a good sprinkling of cheese.

And voilà, there it is! Served with a wedge of lemon, and you have your pane con la milza, sort of. You'd need to be a bit of an adventurous eater to go for this, but it's actually quite good; the sourness of the cheese and lemon goes very well with the taste of the spleen, which can be best described as a cross between between blood cake and liver.

In sum: pork spleen looks a bit off-putting and is probably not suitable for that very special home-cooked dinner date you were planning for your significant other. But it's nutrient packed, tasty if you're into offal, and cheap. So why not?