Salama da sugo

The salama da sugo is made in the province of Ferrara, more precisely in a handful of communes (Buonacompra, Madonna dei Boschi, Poggio Renatico, Vigarano Mainarda, Portomaggiore, and Fiscaglia), which have long disputed primacy over the product, each holding its own annual festival. Its singularity lies in a rare assembly: a forcemeat that unites lean meat, fat, liver and tongue in a casing itself uncommon in Italy, the pig’s bladder, whose thick wall withstands the long hours of poaching that follow maturation. The spherical shape, divided into eight or sixteen segments according to the artisan’s habit, has no equivalent for a sausage elsewhere in this book.

The product is documented at the Este court from the turn of the sixteenth century. A letter from Lorenzo the Magnificent to Ercole I d’Este, cited by contemporary local sources, is considered its first written mention. The steward Cristoforo da Messisbugo, in Banchetti, composizioni di vivande e apparecchio generale, describes a preparation of mortadelle di carne that incorporates wine into the forcemeat, which, in Ferrarese tradition, is regarded as the direct ancestor of the salama. The spices employed (cinnamon, clove, nutmeg) were at that time costly enough to reserve their consumption for aristocratic tables. The kinship with the aromatic profile of the Modenese cotechino and zampone (see those entries) places the salama within a Renaissance Emilian cuisine that favoured warm spices, while the rest of European charcuterie kept to pepper and herbs.

The product received its first precise gastronomic description in 1761, in L’agricoltore ferrarese by Don Domenico Chendi, parish priest of Tresigallo, who devotes the December chapter to the domestic making of the sausage, its round shape and its eating with a spoon. Eleven years later, the Ferrarese magistrate Antonio Frizzi devoted to it La Salameide, a burlesque poem printed in Venice in two hundred copies, in which he calls the forcemeat ‘tender porphyry’, an image that captures the dark red, marbled appearance of the flesh once cooked. This literary density is exceptional for a charcuterie: few European sausages, with the exception of the mortadella, can claim such documentary continuity between the Renaissance court and the gastronomic erudition of the eighteenth century.

The making has two particular features. Maturation, first, lasts at least six months under the PGI specification, though tradition calls for eight to twelve, in cool, dark rooms where the salama develops a layer of natural moulds on its surface that is brushed off before cooking. The piombatura test (from the verb piombare, to plunge) consists of immersing the salama in cold water before cooking: if it sinks, maturation has gone well; if it floats, air pockets have formed inside, a warning that the flesh may be rancid. This check, handed down from generation to generation, is recorded in all the local sources and used by artisanal producers. Cooking, second, is done without pricking, unlike that of the cotechino: the bladder must not be pierced, on pain of seeing the juice disperse into the poaching water. The salama is hung in a cloth from a wooden spoon laid across the rim of the pot, immersed but touching neither the bottom nor the sides, for four to eight hours, according to size and length of maturation.

A pre-cooked, vacuum-packed version has been developed in response to the difficulty of cooking for several hours in contemporary domestic kitchens.

The salama is traditionally served in winter, as a single dish given its richness, with mashed potato moistened with a spoonful of its red juice. A summer variant, the salama da taj (from tagliare, to cut), is eaten raw in thin slices, like a dry sausage, with melon or figs, recalling the sweet-and-sour practice of Renaissance Ferrara. The Jewish community of Este, which has been present in Ferrara for centuries, produced a kosher variant, as attested by local sources. The product remains widely distributed only within Emilia-Romagna: its demanding cooking technique, its relative obscurity, and the absence of an exportable industrial equivalent explain its near-total absence from international markets, including within the Italian diaspora.