Italian Salami: A Comprehensive Analysis

Salami is the generic Italian term that identifies dry-fermented sausages, a wide and diverse class of meat products. However, other terms such as soppressata, sopressa, and salsiccia define some typologies of dry-fermented sausages that are usually produced in Southern Italy with a few exceptions (e.g., Sopressa Vicentina). In this context, it is important to keep the meaning of the words distinct. Salume is the Italian word for salted and cured meats, whereas the word salami means dry-fermented sausages, and salame is the corresponding singular form to indicate a single piece. The root of the term salami can be traced back to the word salt, a substance that was kneaded into minced meat. It seems that this term entered the common usage in 1436 through Niccolò Piccinino, a commander of arms employed by the Duke of Milan. He based his operations in Parma where he made the following order for “... porchos viginti a carnibus pro sallamine...” which means “twenty pigs to make the salame.” Before then, cured, bagged meats were called, rather generically, botulus or insicia. Later, in 1581, the word salame appeared for the first time in a cooking manual, referring to a pork sausage. This book was created by Vincenzo Cervio, a meat carver of Casa Farnese. Still later, in 1678, Vincenzo Tanara wrote a recipe on how to make salame: a mix of weighed fat or lean meat along with 6% sodium chloride and 12 ounces of pepper for every 100 lb of meat. However, it is interesting to remember that in ancient times, the term salamen, even before it referred to salted meat, customarily meant salted fish, a product that would later come to be known as stockfish and salted cod. It is highly probable that, in that same period, the word salamen entered into common usage as a means of describing an obtuse and expressionless person, like a codfish (Spisni, 2017). In this discussion on Italian charcuterie with specific reference to fermented and seasoned sausages, we want to guide the reader through the history of these products with some examination of its most important cultural and social implications. For this purpose, we will describe the historical–cultural significance of the two main ingredients of salami, namely salt and pork, first in the peasant tradition and then in the industrial one. In Italy, all production of salami carrying a mark of origin is carried out using only meat obtained from heavy pigs, in order to have products of distinguishable quality. In addition, salt is so important that in the Vicenza dialect the salame in its traditional size (less than 800 g of weight at the end of ripening) is called salado, which means salty, to emphasize the fundamental role played by salt in the transformation of meat. The discussion then goes into detail on three Italian salami, specifically the sopressa Vicentina, the ciauscolo and the salame Milano. We've chosen these three salami because there are some specific peculiarities in their production technology that clearly distinguishes them from other bagged and fermented products, and for the wide diffusion and notoriety in the market enjoyed by the products themselves, as is the case of the salame Milano.