Zampone
A whole pig’s trotter, boned, scraped and stuffed with the same forcemeat as the cotechino. The container changes everything: the trotter's skin, thicker than a casing, releases abundant collagen during cooking, which gives the zampone its melting character.
| Lean pork shoulder | 500 g |
| Pork rind | 300 g |
| Pork jowl | 200 g |
| Fine salt | 25 g |
| Ground black pepper | 3 g |
| Grated nutmeg | 2 g |
| Ground clove | 1 g |
| Ground cinnamon | 0.5 g |
| White wine | 50 ml |
| Whole pig’s trotter, boned | — |
- Preparing the trotter: Bone the pig’s trotter from the inside, keeping the skin intact to form a pocket. Clean and scrape.
- Preparing the forcemeat: Follow the same recipe as for the cotechino: mince the meat and the rind, then season with the spices and the wine.
- Stuffing: Fill the trotter with forcemeat, packing well. Sew the opening securely.
- Maturing: Hang for 2 to 3 days in a cool place to let the surface dry.
- Cooking: Wrap in a cloth, then tie. Soak for 4 to 6 hours in cold water. Prick gently. Cook at the barest simmer for 4 to 5 hours.
- Serving: Cut into thick slices. Serve with lentils and mashed potatoes. The skin of the trotter should be meltingly tender.
What makes the zampone is the trotter. The forcemeat is that of the cotechino (pork, rind, warm spices), but the container changes everything: instead of a casing, it is stuffed into the skin of a pig’s foreleg trotter, boned, scraped and sewn. This skin, thicker than a casing, releases more collagen during cooking than the rind alone, giving the zampone a more pronounced gelatinous texture than its Modenese cousin.
Boning the trotter demands meticulous work: the bones and tendons must be removed without piercing the skin, and the opening sewn up after stuffing so that it withstands several hours of simmering. This artisanal process partly explains the higher cost of zampone compared with cotechino, as well as its association with large family meals rather than everyday eating.
Its origin, like that of the cotechino, is attached to the siege of Mirandola in 1511. Tradition, taken up by the Modena IGP consortium, credits the cooks of the regent Francesca Trivulzio with the idea of using the skin of boned pigs’ trotters as a natural container, alongside casings, to preserve the meat of the last animals slaughtered before the arrival of the troops of Pope Julius II. The two products share this founding story; however, their documentary records diverge. The first written attestation of the zampone, under the name zampetto, appears in Vincenzo Tanara’s L’economia del cittadino in villa (1644), more than a hundred and thirty years after the episode, a gap characteristic of culinary invention narratives constituted in retrospect.
Like the cotechino, the zampone is served with lentils at the year’s-end meal. It's a more spectacular presentation (the whole trotter set on a dish and carved at the table) that makes it festive. The zampone Modena PGI, obtained in 1999 jointly with that of the cotechino, imposes the same requirements of territory and composition.
Castelnuovo Rangone, a commune in the province of Modena, is home to most of the production. Since 1991 the town has held, without interruption, the Guinness record for the largest zampone in the world; after a stepwise progression (450 kg in 2000, 942 kg in 2008), the record today stands at 1,038 kilograms, reached in 2014, cooked in a steel vat built for the purpose and distributed to several thousand people on the main square.
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