The "Yuck!" Side of Italian Food

Sufrite: Looks good but, "Yuck!"

For the most part, Italian food is the most deliciously prepared food on the planet. Nothing else compares, leastwise in my opinion. But there are a few dishes I'll pass on. Actually, there's a few dishes that are decidedly on the "Yuck!" side.

It pains me to write about Italian dishes that are on the "Yuck!" side of Italian food. Worse yet, my beloved grandmother made some of them. She not only made them, she made them rather regularly. So today, I'll write about a few of her "Yuck!" dishes that stand out in my memory.

Sufrite is pronounced "soo-freet."  You kind of roll the "r" when you say it. Sufrite is something my grandmother made often for my Dad and my Dad just loved it. To me, sufrite rates high on the "Yuck!" list. By the way, there's another Italian dish called sofrito and sufrite is not sofrito. I'm not confusing the two if you thought I might be doing that.

Sufrite is made with intestinal organs like an animal's heart and spleen, but the main ingredient was lungs. Lungs! Lungs, by the way, are no longer available for human consumption. The USDA banned them some years ago. (Which is okay by me!)  They banned them because of air pollution. You worry about pollution in the air you breathe? If so, and you should, you probably don't want to eat lungs because they're filled with the crap that's the pollution in air pollution.

The way sufrite is made is fairly simple: You sauté the lungs and other internal organs with garlic and peppers, add Italian spices and some tomato sauce, simmer for a while, quite a while, and serve.

Yuck!

My Dad gobbled it down like there was no tomorrow. He loved it! I'd watch him eat sufrite and feel nauseous. Sufrite might look good and, who knows, it might even taste okay (I wouldn't know, I never had the stones to try it) but if you know what it's made from, you might also have it on your personal "Yuck!" list like I always have. Sufrite probably belongs on that TV show -- I forget what it's called -- with the cook who goes around the world and eats disgusting stuff like bugs and worse.

The other "Yuck!" food I'll mention today is goat brains or sheep brains. Nuh uh! Not for me! No thank you. I'll pass. You start eating a goat's brains and the next thing you know, you have an urge to start running at and butting things with your head.

When I was a kid, I used to stay at my grandparent's home for a few weeks or so each summer. My grandmother would prepare goat or sheep brains for my grandfather's breakfast. Breakfast! She scrambled eggs in with the goat or sheep brains and then, when it was all cooked up in the pan, she'd put it back in a goat's or sheep's half-skull. That's right, scrambled eggs and goat brains on the half-skull!  First thing in the morning! Again, it might taste okay, I have no clue, but I seriously felt sick while watching my grandfather fork it out of the skull and wolf it down with his morning coffee.

In the awesome Viet Nam War movie, "Apocalypse Now!" directed by the awesome Italian-American film-maker, Francis Ford Copolla, Robert Duvall's character, Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, said he loved the smell of napalm in the morning, but I can't say the same for the smell goat brains and eggs in the morning.

Yuck!