Before I’m allowed to start gunning down rival family members in Mafia: The Old Country, I’m asked to help with a more important task: dinner. An early sequence has me picking up a butchered pig carcass and hauling it over to a kitchen where cooks prepare a meal for the powerful Torrisi family. What’s on the menu? Pork spezzatino, of course.
That’s an Italian dish befitting of The Old Country’s early 1900s setting, but developer Hangar 13 doesn’t just name-drop the meal for set dressing. Instead, there’s a full-on recipe for it on a kitchen counter – complete with a wine glass stain on the paper. It’s one of many small details meant to give the latest Mafia game some cultural authenticity. There was only one way to know just how well it accomplishes that task, though.
Could Mafia pass an all-important taste test? I’d have to put on my apron and get to work in the kitchen to know for sure.
For the medigans among you, spezzatino is a traditional Italian stew. It’s not so much a specific recipe that needs to be followed to a T as it is a freestyle dish that can be made from whatever ingredients you have hanging around the kitchen. It often involves slowly cooking tough cuts of meat with some vegetables and broth, but flexibility is the point.
That’s reflected in The Old Country’s take on it, penned by Torrisi family member Valentina. The pork dish calls for 11 ingredients cooked over nine simple steps. It all boils down to cooking a few vegetables, browning chunks of pork, covering it all in liquid, and letting it cook for 5 hours. All of this is incredibly nondescript, which makes replicating the recipe in real life a bit challenging. There are no measurements dictating how much butter or broth to put in. The steps don’t say how long the pork should be cooked. If I was going to make it, I’d have to trust my own culinary instincts.
My assumption is that Hangar 13 didn’t intend for anyone to actually reproduce its stew, so it didn’t think to include an exhaustive set of steps, but the vague nature of the recipe is authentic in some ways. You can look back to Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well for an example. The foundational 1891 Italian cookbook doesn’t always lay out exact times and measurements to be followed. There’s a level of cultural street smarts baked into its pages. It didn’t need to tell Italians of the era how long to cook their onions; everyone reading it would already have their own methodology. The same goes for Valentina in the world of Mafia.
That fact was emphasized when I called my father, a born and raised Italian who immigrated to the United States from Capestrano, to fill in a few of the recipe’s gaps. As soon as I mentioned spezzatino, he launched into a full spiel as if he had rehearsed it. He suggested that I dredge the pork in flour first, which would later thicken the sauce and turn it into something more closely resembling a gravy. It’s a great suggestion, but for the purposes of this experiment, I wanted to stay as true to the recipe as it appears in the game. After all, I was making a Sicilian stew, not an Abruzzese one.
The only place I’d take some liberties is in the undefined seasoning, browning the meat before the vegetables, and putting it all in a slow cooker to avoid running a gas stove for five hours. That also meant sticking to the basic ingredients as presented in the game, one area that raises a few questions about the recipe’s authenticity. For instance, while butter was certainly used in 1900s Italy, it would have been much more common for Sicilians to use lard instead.
The bigger red flag is the use of “bone broth.” That’s something that peasants in 1904 would likely have on hand, as it would be common to boil your animal bones to get the most out of them, but “bone broth” itself is a trendy term in wellness communities today rather than something an Italian peasant would have written down. In fact, actually buying bone broth for this recipe rather than making my own turned out to be an expensive task that ballooned the cost up significantly.
The irony here is that spezzatino was historically supposed to be an inexpensive meal. It comes from a style of Italian cooking referred to as la cucina povera, or “poor kitchen.” The idea is that these were good meals that poor families could make with whatever they had at their disposal. That’s why it doesn’t really matter whether you add in celery or take out the potatoes; whatever you could get from the farm would do. The Torrisi family isn’t exactly poor in The Old Country, as evidenced by the fact that the recipe calls for a “generous pouring” of red wine, but that’s the beauty of Italian dishes like this. They can be easily adapted to fit different social classes, even letting a peasant eat well when times are tough.
It’s not a thoughtless recipe choice; spezzatino is the key to unlocking The Old Country’s greater historical context. It tells us that we are not living in a romanticized version of Sicily where every day is a feast. The people of Mafia’s Sicily are struggling to keep food on the table as poverty takes hold across the island. That was the case in real life circa 1904 as well, when the aftermath of Italy’s unification left Sicilian peasants with high taxes. Disease, a mandatory draft, the impact of free trade on agriculture, and more ingredients all mixed into the Mediterranean Sea. This was all coming off the heels of brigands rising up to fight the local government post-unification, the effects of which still lingered even after the uprising ended. Those are the conditions that helped the mafia grow in Sicily; it’s all contained within that bowl of spezzatino.
All of this was simmering in my mind as three pounds of pork shoulder soaked in red wine and bone broth for the next five hours. That’s the great thing about stew: You get a lot of time to think. I spent the day brushing up on Italian history as a heavenly scent gradually filled the house. I thought about Enzo, The Old Country’s leading man, and his transformation from a mistreated laborer who resorts to crime to get by. I thought about my real Italian ancestors, who no doubt had to reach into la cucina povera to make ends meet. Every recipe tells a story, and some of Italy’s most basic cuisine paints a picture of economic uncertainty.
At around 7 p.m. that night, it was time for the finishing touches. I tossed some peas into the broth per the recipe and topped it off with some fresh rosemary. Though my own Italian instinct was to pour it over some polenta, I ladled it into a few bowls just to stay true to Valentina’s vision. There was enough history packed into the recipe, but how did the world of Mafia actually taste?
Molto bene.
Okay, that shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who looked over the recipe. Spezzatino is foolproof by design. There’s very little preparation needed and barely any hands-on cooking time involved. A five-hour slow cook meant that the tough pork shoulder had nearly achieved that coveted melt-in-your-mouth quality. The “generous pouring” of merlot added some needed depth to the broth. And the dense smattering of vegetables gave the entire dish a hearty quality that could fill you up in one bowl. Even in a Brooklyn apartment, it felt like the kind of meal that could sustain a family in the countryside. It was a perfect capper to my Mafia experience, a playthrough that left me eager to better understand the rich history of a country whose trauma has long been mined for Hollywood thrills.
Food for thought, indeed.
