The choice to treat the Americas in a single chapter, from Canada to Patagonia, rests on a shared logic: American charcuterie traditions are, for the most part, European inheritances transformed by local ingredients, the spices of the New World, and the immigrant or deported communities that received and adapted them. This continuity justifies presenting them together rather than country by country. It is not a matter of effacing the pre-Hispanic traditions that predate colonisation, but of underlining that the American continent is, in this book, the best-documented ground on which charcuterie was reshaped by colonisation and migration.

The chapter ‘The circulations’ describes in detail how the Iberian sausages crossed the Atlantic and how the European migrations of the nineteenth century carried charcuterie techniques across the whole continent. The most striking trait of the charcuteries documented here is the speed with which imported products became local: one or two generations suffice for the original technique to be reformulated to suit the available spices, the climate, and the tastes of the host communities.

Canada and the United States, with the exception of Louisiana, exhibit distinct trajectories by community of immigration. The German immigrants of the nineteenth century introduced the Frankfurter würstchen, which industrial standardisation made into one of the most consumed sausages in the world. The Eastern European communities settled in Montreal, and the Prairies brought their traditions of smoked sausages, of which the Montreal smokie is the heir. Louisiana constitutes a particular hearth of innovation: in a restricted space, the superposition of French, Spanish, African and Amerindian traditions produced, in less than a century, several sausages that exist nowhere else.

Mexico is the American space where the pre-Hispanic and colonial heritances are most directly legible in a single preparation. The dried ancho and guajillo chillies, from varieties cultivated on the central plateau well before the conquest, were folded into an Iberian stuffing technique to produce a chorizo different from that of Spain. The Peruvian chillies present in the salchicha de Huacho testify to the same persistence: local spices so structured colonial charcuterie preparations that they moved them away from their original models.

The American sausages circulate today to the rhythm of contemporary migrations. The Latin American diasporas settled in Europe feed a demand legible in the specialist grocers of Madrid, Paris and London.