The wurst day
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Happy National Salami Day!
Salami has a relatively unknown history as its creation cannot easily be traced to a particular time. However, some researchers believe that the ancient Romans would eat salami as a part of a larger food group that used salt as a preservative which is probably where it got its name, since ‘salare’ is Italian for salt.
Most people consider salami to be an Italian food–and even the word is Italian! The English language simply used the pluralized form of the Italian word ‘salame’ to indicate the cased meat but, in English, ‘salami’ is singular.
As an air-cured pork meat, salami is a cased meat that was originally wrapped in a natural skin made of other parts of the pig. Sometimes it is also made from beef, wild boar, goose, venison or even duck for unique variations.
Meat for salami comes from different parts of the pig (or other animal), and should include a mixture of lean meat as well as fat in order to get the flavor just right. That’s why the look of the inside of the meat has a marbled looking texture. Although ‘lean salami’ has been popularized for its health benefits, most artisanal salami makers would say that the flavor is not as good.
To make salami, the meat is ground up to a fine texture and then flavored by adding spices or herbs. Some of the most popular flavorings include garlic, white pepper, vinegar or even wine. (Salami’s flavor is not as strong as its popular pizza-topping cousin, pepperoni.) Once stuffed into the casing, salami is usually aged in a fermentation and drying process that lasts between one and three months–or sometimes longer, even up to several years.
Today, Europe is a huge producer of salami. In fact, between Germany, Italy, France, Hungary and the other countries that produce it, several hundred million pounds of salami are produced and eaten each year.
National Salami Day got its start fairly recently, in 2006. Started in Henrico, Virginia by a group known as the Salami Appreciation Society (SAS), the idea was that the salami is a meat that is far too often overlooked and it needed to be given its day in the sun. The official National Salami Day website offers fun tidbits and ideas for celebrating.
http://www.salamiday.com/types_of_salami.html
Varieties of salami include:
- Cotto
- Genoa
- Fegatelli
- Finocchiona
- Pepperoni
- Saucisson sec
- Sopressata
Many Old World salami are named after the region or country of their origin. Examples include Arles, Genoa, Hungarian and Milano salame. Many are flavored with garlic. Some types � including a few varieties from Spain, most Hungarian types, and southern Italian styles (such as pepperoni, derived from salsiccia Napoletana piccante) include paprika or chili powder. Varieties are also differentiated by the coarseness or fineness of the chopped meat as well as the size and style of the casing used.
In the United States, traditional salami are either imported or referred to as an "Italian Salame", the protected term for salami made in the United States.
One of the most expensive and well-regarded types of salame, the Felino, brings a great amount of money to the local industry of the province of Parma and Emilia-Romagna in general. There is a small statue in the town of Felino dedicated to the pig. According to the inscription on the statue, the people of these areas brought out the best quality of the pig to create the grandest of all pork-derived products in Italy if not in the whole known world: the Salame di Felino and Prosciutto di Parma, showing how much pride and dignity Italians have for these traditions.
In Sicilian oral lore, salami is said to have been the favorite cured meat of Jesus Christ.
