For a Late Summer Glow Up Cook This Fortifying Roman Coratella, a Platter of Rich Offal

If you’re on Instagram then there’s a large chance you’ve come across a user named @byashleyenglish one of those who broadcasts her ‘everything I eat in a day’ reels from an idyllic pastoral location in America. 

While stroking ponies and walking barefoot on the beach, she’s seen sipping raw milk, smiling eerily at the camera in ASMR tone. Her skin is immaculate and we sometimes find ourselves wanting whatever it is she is on. It’s somewhat unfortunate, then, that she happens to be eating plates of raw liver, raw bone marrow and raw minced beef for breakfast. It’s all pretty vulgar and yet what she projects is a version of beautiful. 

Though I hate to admit it, she influenced me. I stopped ordering oat milk in my coffees and felt very forward-thinking. I also started thinking about nourishing myself more with offal. 

Ashley English’s fave, and the modern elixir for glowing skin, apparently, is raw lambs liver.

Lucky in that case, that I recently found myself in Rome – specifically in a restaurant called Piatto Romano in Testaccio where I ate one particular dish that I will never forget. It was called Coratella: a symphony of lamb kidneys, heart and liver, cooked in the most graceful way, with caramelised onions and bay. 

On return to the UK I called up the butchers on Essex Road and managed to get hold of the internal organs of a whole lamb for under £10. The butchers were curious as to what I was doing with them. “A Roman dish called coratella,” I said. The butcher said “Greek then.” “No… Roman…?” I offered again. He said “well actually if Roman… Greek.” OK mate. 

I get what he was trying to say, but this isn’t actually an ancient dish. It was born in the 1870s, during a time when a local Testaccio slaughterhouse paid its workers in animal innards. Food as currency.

History lessons aside, this week’s recipe is about cooking from memory. More specifically, using the memory of an eating experience as direction towards a particular end, knowing how something should taste. The experience of eating this dish taught me about clever Roman cooking, turning something many deem vulgar and which is objectively inexpensive into something sweet and luxurious.

So it is with this particular dish in mind and in an attempt to learn how to cook offal correctly that I present this recipe. If not in the name of beauty, then for some life hacks in clever, economical living.

Recipe for 4 people. 

1 lambs heart
1 lambs liver
2 kidneys
2 whole white onions
1 shallot
2 cloves of garlic, minced finely
2 bay leaves
2 glasses of white wine
Half a glass of brandy
8 tbsp olive oil
50g butter

Begin by preparing the offal. 

Cut your kidneys in half and remove the inner tendons using a pair of sharp scissors. Chop into cubes of about 1 cm. Using a sharp knife, trim off the tough vessel from the heart at the top of the organ and chop into 1 cm cubes. Do the same with the liver. 

Next, peel the onions and cut in half before slicing into 0.5 cm segments. 

Take a decent sized sauté pan and begin by adding two tbsp olive oil on a medium heat, then add the bay leaves so that they sizzle on entry.

Now add the onion and a generous seasoning of salt, using a wooden spoon, while keeping the onion moving intermittently so it begins to melt, while also taking on a little colour. Continue the process until the onions are caramelised and soft but still retain a little bite. Add the minced garlic about eight minutes into cooking to perfume the onions until golden.

After two more minutes, remove the onions, garlic and bay from the pan and set aside.

Turn up the heat now and add 2 tbsp more of olive oil to the pan, spread the heart, well seasoned with salt and pepper across the breadth of the pan in an even layer, leave motionless to enable caramelisation (about four minutes) and repeat on the other side for four minutes before removing from pan to sit atop of the onions. De-glaze the pan with half of the white wine, reduce by half and pour the jus over the reserved onions and heart. Now with a reset pan, add the well seasoned kidneys, with 2 tbsp of olive oil and sear on a medium heat in the same fashion, for six minutes in total. Remove, deglaze as before with the remainder of the white wine, and finally, with the pan reset once more, add 2 tbsp of olive oil together with the butter this time – heat until foaming and on a medium high heat brown the liver on both sides, two minutes each. Once golden brown and crispy and still pink in the middle, add brandy and cook the alcohol off for 30 seconds. Now add back in the rest of the offal with onions and bay into the pan to bring everything together until hot. The mass should be glossy and wet with the glazing juices and deep brown in colour.

Put onto a sharing platter with a wedge of lemon to cut through the richness and enjoy eating it with a hunk of bread. 

Hannah Hammond is a London-based chef who has worked at the River Cafe and Leo’s in London, and Le Servan in Paris. All photography by Hannah Hammond.