Uccelli Scappati – Veal Skewers, Tuscany

In Tuscany, as elsewhere, small birds used to be roasted on skewers: the juniper thrush or Krammetsvogel has been one of the favorite dishes of Florentine citizens for six hundred years. Today, environmentally conscious Florentines no longer eat thrushes, but they do enjoy skewers called “Uccelli scappati”, which literally means “birds that have flown away”. They are made of bacon, calf’s liver, veal and sage leaves, and the liver gives them a little of the slightly bitter gamey taste of the small birds, which were part of the popular diet in Italy, like snails, frogs and wild vegetables.

Cut the meat, liver and bacon into squares about 4 cm wide and spit a piece of meat, a piece of liver, a piece of bacon and a sage leaf twice on a wooden stick until everything is used up. Melt the butter in a frying pan, add a sage leaf and fry the skewers until they look golden brown. Deglaze with a little beef broth and let it cook on a low fire for about twenty minutes, adding a little more beef broth if necessary.

Polenta tastes very good with the “Uccelli scappati”. In Florence, as with all other meat dishes, white beans are almost always eaten with it. This is the favorite vegetable of the whole region and not spinach, as we think in our country, where the expression “alla fiorentina” means the addition of spinach m

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