From “cuoppo” to “pane e panelle”. The real Italian Street Food tradition is a triumph of taste!

Nowadays streets are full of food trucks, kiosks and stands where food is the real protagonist. In Italy there are many symbols of street food, coming from the north to the south: pizza, pane and panelle, bread with spleen, lampredotto, cuoppo and so on. We already talked about the origins of pizza but there are so many dishes left to discover.

– Panino con la milza (sandwich with spleen) has noble origins, it derives from the French and was the etymology of today’s gateau. The spleen sandwich was created in the halal and kosher slaughterhouses by Jews who paradoxically do not eat it. They were not able to earn money because of the laws of the Koran and the Talmud, so they received the interiors, lung, spleen, cartilages of the throat in exchange for their work.
With a brilliant market investigation worthy of those of today, jews questioned the quantity of Muslims and Christians. Because Christians were in competition with them, Jews created a sandwich with lard for them without problems. Thus the spleen sandwich was born in the walls of the slaughter of Palermo of the Jews and the Muslims.

– Lampredotto, a classic sandwich loved by the famous poet who wrote the “Divine Comedy”: Dante. It’s made by one of the four stomach of calf and it’s very delicious.

– Pane e panelle. This street food was borned in the marvellous Sicily, and it’s a sort of polenta made by fried beans flour, water and parsley. Arabs invented it between the 10th and 11th century and this basic but tasty particular food obtained success by royalties through the years, it was appreciated by writers such as Luigi Pirandello, Leonardo Sciascia and other politicians.

– Cuoppo, made in Napoli. It offers so many fried specialities, savoury or sweet. This was a dish created in 1800 from poor people which usually cooked it on the doorway with the few ingredients they had. In the alleyways the cook who fried food was a sort of reference: he also accepted payment within 8 days, in order to help people to obtain enough money to feed themselves.