Food Pics from Italy - Wild Boar, Rabbit Meat, and Other Curious Fares

On the flight to Milan I was fortunate to be seated beside an intensely talkative Italian-Canadian guy named Francesco (yes I do mean fortunate, you cynics!). So it displaced several hours of uncomfortable sleep with nine straight hours of talk, but I didn't mind as I learned much about the Italian national passion for food and football from a great guy who loved both.

According to Francesco he was quite a footballer in his day (even trying out for a couple of Serie A teams in his early 20's), but mostly he left me the impression as a genuine lover of food, an attribute clearly verifiable from his waistline. We traded favorite food recipes and recommendations about exotic items in the traditional gourmet of our home countries. Well worthwhile for myself at least, as I took his advice to find wild boar and rabbit meat during my trip. I'm not sure though if he intended to take my advice to try chicken feet and snake soup on his next visit to Toronto's Chinatown.



So one night after work, I spent a good 45 minutes scouring the streets of downtown Florence for a restaurant menu that presented wild boar (cinghiale). It turned out that wild boar meat was not as easy to find as Francesco said; many restaurants served dishes with wild boar sauce but few served the meat itself. At the end I concluded the search successfully at a little ristorante called Semidivino, a few blocks west of the Duomo.



This is Cinghiale alla Maremmana (Wild Boar of Maremma), which was wild boar meat stewed with olives and tomato puree. I thought the meat actually tasted more like red meat than pork, with a strong game flavor, and the meat fibres were very thick. The meat was very well stewed to take out the toughness of the meat -- that must have taken a whole day of stewing.



My wife wasn't very surprised when I told her on the phone about having wild boar -- for her it would be a real surprise if my food stories fail to surprise. But telling her about having rabbit on my dinner plate was a different thing. I guess you're less lovable when you're 200 kg and grunts and have two giant canines sticking out of your snout, but if you're cuddly and furry and soft, women just can't help falling for you.

Anyway, rabbit meat was much easier to find. Probably one in four restaurants I visited in Florence served rabbit. I ended up having a very enjoyable dish of rabbit meat medallions at the restaurant inside Novotel Firenze Nord Aeroporto where I stayed.



Medaglioni di Coniglio. It was a thick slice of a roasted rabbit skin pouch stuffed with rabbit meat and eggs (chicken eggs, not rabbit eggs!). The rabbit was a soft, fine textured white meat and was very succulent. Wonderful dish from an otherwise nondescript hotel.



What's this you ask? Not quite a main course, but certainly worthy of mention in the context of Fiorentine cuisine. This is a sandwich filled with Trippa (beef tripes) served at the famous Nerbone at Florence's central market. I specifically came here for the Trippa since I'm a fan of beef tripes at Chinese Dim Sum places. This turned out to be entirely small intestines, a little too fatty for my taste.



Nerbone at the Mercato Centrale in Firenze, an old plebeian establishment at a corner of the market. They also serve pork sandwiches for those who may be uncomfortable with chomping down cow intestines.