Cotechino

The cotechino is a large cooking sausage from Modena whose rind makes up about 30 per cent of the forcemeat. It is this rind that makes the product: during the long cooking, its collagen converts into gelatine, creating the characteristic unctuous texture. Cooking at too high a heat prevents this conversion and produces a firm, dry sausage instead of the melting texture sought.

In 1511, Mirandola (in the Modena region) was besieged by the troops of Pope Julius II. Local tradition, taken up by the Consortium Modena IGP as the product’s symbolic birth certificate, has it that the besieged slaughtered their last pigs to keep them from the enemy and charged their cooks with making the most of every part: flesh, rind, fat and spices stuffed into a casing. The same story explaining the origin of the zampone is developed in that entry. The episode belongs to narrative rather than documented fact: the contemporary chronicles of the siege, otherwise abundant, mention no culinary invention. The first written attestations of the cotechino under this name date only from the second half of the eighteenth century.

The cotechino belongs to an older family of Emilian salumi da cuocere, the most widespread form of which it is. Its cousin, the cappello del prete of the provinces of Parma and Piacenza, attested from the sixteenth century, shares the same forcemeat of rind, lean meat and jowl; its singularity lies in its envelope: not a cylindrical casing but two triangular pieces of rind sewn by hand, which give it the characteristic shape of an ecclesiastical tricorne. Several Emilian sources present it as the direct ancestor of the cotechino, whose technique it is said to have prefigured before the beef casing prevailed. It has remained a niche product, made to order by the charcutiers of the provinces of Parma and Piacenza, and is cooked on the same principle: prolonged soaking, followed by several hours’ poaching, and served with mashed potato or lentils.

The warm-spice aromatic profile (nutmeg, clove, cinnamon) is characteristic of medieval Modenese cooking. The cotechino stands apart from most other European cooking sausages, whose seasoning rests on pepper and herbs. The earliest surviving recipes show a remarkable stability of this profile across several centuries.

The cotechino is eaten with lentils at the meal on 31 December in the evening or on 1 January at midday, a custom codified throughout Italy. The lentils symbolise coins by their round shape; the cotechino, rich in gelatine and fat, symbolises abundance for the new year. This ritual meal is observed in Italian families of every region, not only in Emilia-Romagna.

The cotechino Modena PGI, obtained in 1999, requires production in the province of Modena and the neighbouring provinces, a defined composition of lean meat, rind and jowl, a warm-spice seasoning and the absence of additives. The pre-cooked, vacuum-packed version, sold in mass retail, today accounts for the majority of sales: several hours of cooking make fresh cotechino hard to reconcile with the rhythms of contemporary domestic cooking.