Italian Sausage (Sweet & Hot)

The Italian sausage is not an Italian sausage but an Italian-American product, born of the adaptation of the fresh salsicce of southern Italy to the conditions of emigration. Between 1880 and 1914, about four million Italians reached the United States, the great majority from the Mezzogiorno, and gathered in the immigration districts of the large cities, from Little Italy in Manhattan to the North End of Boston. There, they brought their fennel sausages, which they reshaped with American commercial ingredients (see the salsiccia fresca entry, from which the Italian sausage is the most widespread descendant).

What defines the product across the Atlantic lies in a seasoning rather than a regional recipe. Federal regulation requires, for a sausage to bear the name ‘Italian sausage’, that it contain salt, pepper and fennel or anise. The commercial distinction between the sweet and hot versions, to which, in some regions, the term ‘mild ’ is added, does not appear in the recipe offered here; it belongs to manufacturers’ labelling, not to the standard. Fennel, or anise, thus characterises all three varieties and not the sweet alone. According to the culinary guides, which agree without reference to any official definition, the hot owes its heat to the addition of red chilli flakes, while the sweet is without them and may contain basil. In Italy, where a great diversity of regional salsicce very far from the American product coexists, this two- or three-term nomenclature has no currency.

Two features of the making of the Italian sausage attach it to its southern model. The mincing remains coarse, whereas the American breakfast sausage aims at a fine texture. Wine enters the forcemeat: the salsiccia di Calabria counts wine among its aromatic ingredients, a usage the Italian-American butchers preserved, a dry red wine serving both to tenderise the meat and to lift its scent.

On the plate, the product is inseparable from the sausage and peppers, sausage pan-fried with peppers and onions softened in olive oil, served in a roll, a street dish of the Italian-American communities. It is associated with the Festa di San Gennaro, the feast of Naples' patron saint, celebrated on Mulberry Street since 1926, where the sausage-sellers were among the first vendors as the commemoration of a single day became a street fair. Beyond the community of origin, the Italian-style sausage has established itself as a pizza topping: nationally, it ranks second only to pepperoni.