If you are an attentive reader of ours and a food connoisseur, you know already there is more to Italian cuisine than pizza and pasta. What you may not know is that some of our most traditional dishes have peculiar ingredients indeed: from chicken giblets to offal, from chitterlings to snails, we Italians truly cook everything.

Weird dishes to many, but a true symbol of a culinary tradition that has dealt, throughout the centuries, with poverty and famine with a certain “aplomb,” at least in the kitchen. Never the one to step back from or refuse a challenge, the Italian cook has always known that everything can be transformed in something nice to eat, if prepared in the right way and with the right ingredients: we would say, in Italy, that one needs to fare di necessità virtù, to make of necessity a virtue.