Would you eat Catherine de' Medici's favourite dish?

On Cibreo, offal and 'ugly' Italian classics

Cibrèo is a famous, historic dish of Florence - it's well known that Catherine de Medici was such a fan that she almost made herself sick eating too much of it - yet it's hard to find on menus todays and I bet many would even be squeamish about trying it once they find out its main ingredients (hint, chicken offal, namely the crests). But hear me out. It's delicious.

I was asked to talk about this dish for a podcast produced by SBS Italian for a series on “ugly” regional Italian food which will be out next month — actually some of my favourite dishes will be discussed in other episodes, from Roman pajata to Piedmont’s Bagna Cauda. I think ugly brown food (no matter what culture it’s from) has a lot going for it, because for what it makes up for in looks, it is almost always comforting and nostalgia-inducing.

I have to admit, I'd never eaten Cibrèo, let alone cooked it before being asked to talk about it for the podcast. But of course I’d heard about it, you can’t read about Florentine food history or Catherine de’ Medici (the Florentine gastronome and great-great-granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who became Queen of France when she married Henry II and is credited with bringing everything from spinach, artichokes, crepes and forks to Paris when she insisted her Florentine chefs go with her) without bumping into it. It’s also the name of one of Florence’s most important culinary institutions, Cibreo restaurant, where, incidentally, my husband Marco will start working as Head Sommelier next week.

So I did what I always do when I need some very special ingredients - I visited my friend and butcher Andrea Falaschi at his family’s Slow Food butcher shop, Sergio Falaschi, for some chicken offal. Specifically I needed: the crests (or cockscomb) and wattle (the floppy but beneath the beak), livers, heart and testicles, or fagioli, "beans," as they are called here.

Marco and I cooked them following more or less the recipes of 19th century recipe of Artusi and another classic from Paolo Petroni's Il Grande Libro della Vera Cucina Fiorentina - onion and sage are cooked in some butter and olive oil, then the crests are added, with a splash of white wine, and cooked for 15 minutes before the rest goes in, a bit of stock and another 15 minutes of cooking. A couple of egg yolks and juice of half a lemon are whisked together and poured over the top for just an instant - it doesn't scramble but rather makes a smooth, thickened, incredibly creamy sauce.

It was simply divine and I can see why this dish was considered one for princesses and not a "poor" dish. Despite its ugly looks and what you might think of the ingredients, the taste of it is incredibly luxurious, everything just melts in the mouth like butter. In fact cockscombs or crests were often used in French cookery along with truffles or for decorating plates to make them appealing. This is special stuff, not just unwanted bits that would otherwise be tossed. 

It made me wonder why is this something that we would be disgusted by and shy away from now? Aside from the question of getting the ingredients — this is definitely harder to do in Australia, for example, as Francesco Mannelli, the head chef at Mode in the Four Seasons in Sydney, was telling us on the same podcast, where apparently it is illegal to sell chickens with the heads attached — what would stop omnivores from preparing a dish with chicken crests and other offal like they did in noble kitchens centuries past in France and Florence? For one thing, I am very interested in something my butcher friend Andrea points out when he serves his family’s famous (and San Miniato’s only Slow Food Presidium) mallegato, a cooked, spiced blood sausage: eating offal, especially organs such as liver or blood, is a testament to the freshness of the ingredients but above all the health of the animal. The animal must have been taken good care of. Incidentally too, the combs of roosters and chickens are indications of their health and vigour, according to World’s Poultry Science Journal. So if you have a good one, you know it’s had a healthy life.

Although offal seems to be off the menu for most, it’s something I come back to again and again (almost ten years ago Marco and I threw a dinner party based entirely on different parts of the pig for each course and wrote about it for a week for Food52) because it seems to me, that eating offal is such an important duty as a conscientious omnivore. To paraphrase the link in my article above, eating offal eliminates food waste, it’s economical, incredibly nutritious (and surprisingly lean), and it could make farming so much more sustainable if more people ate it. I’ve just discovered a whole wonderful cookbook about the subject was published last year called Scarti d’Italia (“the scraps of Italy”), written in English and Italian by a young Italian couple convinced that there was another respectful solution to veganism to help the planet’s environmental crisis and I am running out to get it (see their website here). The idea is that if more people are inspired to cook, eat and enjoy offal, we need less ‘other’ meat:

A 2019 study published in Environmental Science and Technology found that if German consumers substituted muscle meat with offal once a week, greenhouse gas emissions from the country’s meat industry could fall by 14 percent.

In the podcast one of the questions I was asked was how will I make this look appealing? Well, I'm hoping that words are enough to be honest, or that maybe the idea of no waste, nose to tail (or, er, beak to feather?) may appeal to other adventurous and conscientious omnivores. But if you’re still not convinced, what if I stuff pasta with it and serve the deliciously creamy egg yolk sauce over the top? Marco practically cried with joy when he tasted this — that is how good it is and I have never seen him cry over food before!

Inspired by ravioli filled with finanziera (another similar dish but hailing from Piemonte, with a mixture of cockscombs, veal sweetbreads, bone marrow, veal brain, as well as chunks of lean beef and porcini mushrooms) tasted with my friend Lean Timms at the fantastic Ristorante Consorzio in Turin, Marco and I made cappelletti, stuffed with the chicken offal, blended until smooth with some parmesan to stiffen it, and the sauce drizzled over.

It was so delicious Marco was almost moved to tears when he tasted it, especially when he paired it with a glass of sweet Tuscan Vin Santo — sound odd but wow does it work.

Would you try this? You can find the full recipes here.