Bring Out The Falsomagro

Today I bring you a cult Sicilian dish, delicious cousin of the British Sunday roast or the French Beef Carrot but uniquely Sicilian. You may think Sicily as a sun-drenched earty heaven, but it is first and foremost a place of poor and hard-working farmers who always had to make do with a scarcity of food. Meat, especially, was always rare, and Sicilian mamas excelled at using all sorts of tricks to make a tiny bit of meat go a long way. Falsomagro, also called Farsumagru, uses a small amount of premium veal cuts and stuffs it with a mixture of ground meat, breadcrumbs, ham, cheese and hard-boiled whole eggs that give its unique look when cut.

Sometimes the true etymology of a word becomes so lost to most people that a new, popular etymology rewrites the word. In mainstream Italian, we call this falsomagro or false-lean or false-lent. Contemporary Italians wonder why. 'Because it looks lean but there is a lot inside' they venture. While there is certainly 'a lot inside', it does not look overly lean. The recipe was apparently invented during the culinary reign of the Monsù, those French cooks who operated in wealthy Palermitan households starting with the Anjou rule. Others place it in the 15th century under the Spaniard rule. In any case, the original name meant 'lean meat stuffed', as the veal outside is lean (magro) and is stuffed (farci in French). If it was 'farcie de maigre' - stuffed with lean stuffing - originally, it certainly no longer applies. The usual dialectal name is farsumagru was translated into falsomagro, but you might also encounter rollò, braciuluni, braciolone or brociolone. Traditionally bullock meat is used instead of veal, and the meat is fried in lard and not olive oil.

Falsomagro
700gr / 1.5 lbs veal in wide but thin slices
300gr / 0.75lbsveal or pork ground meat
50gr / 2 oz mortadella or salami slices
3-4hard-boiled eggs
1 egg
parsley
75gr / 2 oz caciocavallo, pecorino or parmesan, finely grated
50gr tuma, provola, caciocavallo or fontina cut into sticks
carrot
2 onions
celery
400gr / 1lbs tomato purée
1 glass red wine
75gr / 2 oz breadcrumbs
1 cinamon stick
clove
red chili pepper
10-12 potatoes

Let's prepare the stuffing - clockwise from the bottom left: ground meat, ground parmesan or caciocavallo cheese, breadcrumbs and one egg.

Mix with your bare hands. No mixer please, that would una mancanza di rispetto.

Flavor with the snipped parsley...

... and combine into a ball. Surprise, it holds together mostly thanks to the meat's cohesive power.

Let's the fun begin. First make sure your guests are safely busy in the den and lock the kitchen, so that nobody will be able to barge in and catch you with an half-exploded falsomagro. Lay a clean kitchen towel on the table. I boiled this one a couple times with beef, carrots and a pig's foot, hence the color. The point is that it be clean and devoid of any detergent. Carefully tile the veal slices so that they overlap a little. You should aim for a rectangular shape. If your butcher was lazy when he sliced the veal and your slices are too thick, hammer them with a kitchen cleaver held flat. Don't be shy, this is a Palermitan recipe, per carità!

Spread the meat stuffing, leaving about 5cm/2'' on every side. Covers with the salami or mortadella or ham slices.

Let cut through the cheese - you need a full fat cheese that will melt nicely, such a young caciocavallo or fontina.

Spread one onion sliced thinly over the mortadella layer, then tile the cheese sticks on top. It sounds less and less magro (lean) as the layers go by.

Now the hard boiled eggs. If you start sweating and wonder how the hell you're going to close your falsomagro, you won't be the first. But as the old Sicilian saying goes, 'You'll be amazed what can fit inside a farsumagru'.

Start tying salami-style. This is quite easy. Just tie one of the end with a piece of string and do not cut it. Then pull the string about 5cm/2'' from where you made your first loop and circle again around the falsomagro. Pass the string inside the loop and pull (picture). You'll need to use all three pairs of hands for this. I'm not Vishnu and my falsomagro exploded on its rear end, with two eggs rolling out. But focus on the falsomagro's end you are tying and just place what came out back inside.

Finished. Actually, the more you tie, the easier it gets, and after a certain number of loops it looks really solid. In Sicily they say that 'Do not judge the cook by his falsomagro', but perhaps they say this only because people actually do judge cooks by their falsomagros, and want to remind themselves that size is not everything. Who knows?

Peccato! My largest pot is smaller than my smallest falsomagro. What a pity, I wanted to play 'hide the falsomagro' in this pot. Let's bind the falsomagro a little, there, it fits.

Let's bring a little olive oil to high heat, and then roast the falsomagro on every side to flavor the veal cuts.

Add the spices - cloves, chilies (my way of doing) and a stick of cinammon.

Deglaze with a glass of red wine. How much is 'a glass of red wine'? Ah, just look at the bottle. Enough to bathe the bottom of the dish and dissolve any meat bits that stuck to the pot before the wine is vaporized.

Add about 2 cups of tomatoes, either fresh, skinned and stemmed tomatoes, or from a good quality can. Which do you think I used?

Ah, yes a can. Add a little liquid or stock if you have some. The idea is just to have enough liquid so that the sauce does not stick during the long simmer.

To achieve that home-cooked, homey feel, I recommend you boil some potatoes separately, then add them to the pot. This is the way it was served to me in U Cascinari, an amazing slow-food trattoria in Palermo for a most memorable meal. If you go lazy and add the potatoes uncooked, they might not be cooked through when the falsomagro is ready, so better pre-boil them separately before.

Cover the pot and simmer for about an hour. If the sauce is too chunky, you can use a potato ricer or straight out plunging mixer to make it a bit smoother.

Slice, remove the string and serve. How does it compare to a professional falsomagro? Here is one I ate at Ai Cascinari, a delicious backstreet trattoria in Palermo, frequented exclusively by locals. They added green peas in the sugo, but otherwise it's the exact same dish. Well done FX!

This is one amazing dish! It may not look like much, but I served it to an audience of experienced home chefs the other day, and they immediately endorsed it with cries of 'Jesus that's so good' or 'Hell, I'm going to remember this for long, is there any left?' One nearly fainted, and that was before I brought the Tangerine Sorbet for the dessert. The meat stuffing has a strong hit-me-back state due to the cheese, and the palate is pleasantly surprised to find various morsels inside, each with its own distinct and delicate flavor - cheese, onion or mortadella. A real classic!

Trattoria ai cascinari
Via d'Ossuna 43-45
091 1651 9804
Palermo, Sicily, Italy