“Lampredotto Tastes As Divine As It Looks Infernal.”
Photographed by Michelle Heimerman
Paraphrased from an article by Adam Gollner in the April/May 2017 issue of Saveur magazine
Of all the sensorial delights available in the overstimulating tourist trap that is Florence, could it be that a sloppy street snack of stewed tripe ranks among the very finest?
Behold, lampredotto, Florence's preeminent cibo da strada (or road food), a Renaissance-era sandwich named for its putative resemblance to boiled lamprey (a type of fish resembling an eel). There's no way around it: The stuff is ugly. Wrinkly, flaccid, grayish beige, it emerges from its vat of indiscernible bouillon, wobbling on the end of the trippaio's (tripe-seller's) carving fork. That such a pile of innards is beloved in such a stylish, wealthy merchant center—and has been for over 500 years—is rendered even more incongruous by the city's pastel-hued elegance. It's like a joke from the Middle Ages whose punch line is still being hawked from street carts in San Marco.
Dante probably ate it while pining after Beatrice. There's a good reason for its ongoing appeal: Lampredotto tastes as divine as it looks infernal.
Try it wet, or bagnato, the Florentine term for au jus, in which the bun is moistened with a little of the braising liquid.
Lampredotto is made with the fourth and final stomach compartment of a cow, the rennet-secreting maw known as the abomasum. This forgotten quadrant of ruminant viscera is rarely used in kitchens elsewhere. But in Florence, eating abomasum is a daily habit for all segments of society, as popular among the working class as it is with pin-striped businessmen.
That a cow's stomach chamber can be morphed into a triumph of the culinary arts is a quintessentially Florentine phenomenon. Lampredotto represent the way Florence has democratized deliciousness. In the same way that Dante argued for vernacular Italian to be accorded equal respect as Latin, Florence seems to have understood that expensive food isn't necessarily better food. To succumb to lampredotto's charms is to realize that beauty and ugliness can live in harmony with each other—that they can be unified into a handheld reminder that one cannot actually exist without the other.
