The mazzarelle are a ritual dish of the Easter table in Teramo, prepared with lamb offal — heart, lungs and liver — cut into strips and arranged on a bed of endive or lettuce leaves together with fresh onion, parsley and marjoram, then closed into small bundles tied with carefully cleaned intestines from the same lamb. The dish was described in 1969 in the Dizionario abruzzese e molisano by the glottologist and dialectologist Ernesto Giammarco, who defined mazzarelle as “fried rolls of lamb liver, heart and lungs with fresh garlic, parsley and marjoram; all wrapped in a lettuce leaf and tied with lamb intestines”. Before him, in 1881, the distinguished linguist and philologist from Teramo Giuseppe Savini had briefly referred to them as “lamb offal stewed” in La grammatica ed il lessico del dialetto teramano.

These lexicographical definitions are complemented by local literature that places the dish within the broader framework of Holy Week food traditions in the city of Teramo and its surrounding area, as well as within the evolution of taste resulting from the “influence of Enlightenment ideas” and the subsequent French domination between the end of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the following century, according to the folklorist Giuseppe Di Domenicantonio in his detailed contribution dedicated to mazzarelle and the city’s gastronomic culture.

Their underlying structure appears, in any case, to be that of a recovery dish: the coratella, together with the intestines and other offal, constitutes the least noble part of the Easter lamb, the portion that peasant families could not afford to waste. Mazzarelle therefore emerged as a domestic response to the slaughtering of the animal for the feast, according to a logic of frugality shared by many ritual dishes of central and southern Italy. Their preparation unfolds through a sequence of interconnected operations, with almost liturgical care devoted to cleaning the ingredients. The result of this elaborate process is a dark green roll with an intense and aromatic flavour, in which the richness of the offal is balanced by the delicate bitterness of the endive and the freshness of the spring onion.

Alongside the white version there also exists a version prepared with tomato sauce, documented as a common feature of Teramo urban cuisine and of certain hamlets, as testified by Silvana and Margherita Rastelli, who inherited both variants: their maternal grandmother, originally from the countryside around Sciusciano, prepared them in plain version, without sauce, and served them on Easter morning with two slices of bread, as the sole dish of breakfast; their paternal grandmother, from the city of Teramo and living in a building in the historic centre, would finally add chopped tomato and chilli pepper, reducing the sauce and allowing the already cooked mazzarelle to absorb its flavour. This represents a tangible sign of a distinctly female and domestic genealogical transmission, which gathered around the preparation of mazzarelle, a collective competence made up of micro-variations, comparisons, reciprocal judgements on the final result and a gendered complicity extending across generations.

The ritual context is that of Easter and, more precisely, of the sdijunë, the Teramo breakfast that breaks the fast of Good Friday and Holy Saturday upon returning from the first Mass on Sunday: a rich and hybrid meal, almost an early lunch, composed of hard-boiled eggs, Easter pizza (spianata), homemade cured meats, fresh cheeses and mazzarelle served warm straight from the oven. Within Teramo households, the parallel between the Lamb of God and the animal sacrificed for the feast remains explicit even today. It permeates the experiences of witnesses with a certain ambivalence: the lamb born in spring to be brought to the Easter table is at once the ritual victim and the familiar animal, raised — at least until relatively recent times — in the courtyards of peasant households and cared for during the months preceding its slaughter. For the women who prepare them, mazzarelle express the tangible value of a sacrificial offering used in its entirety, in which even the humblest parts are granted the dignity of a long, meticulous and deeply festive preparation.