The Italian food and wine tradition is characterized by genuine products that are bound up with the territory and whose origins are often very ancient.
Italian cured meats are the flagship of Italian traditional cuisine. These products are meat derivatives and differ from one another in transformation
The Italian food and wine tradition is characterized by genuine products that are bound up with the territory and whose origins are often very ancient.
Italian cured meats are the flagship of Italian traditional cuisine. These products are meat derivatives and differ from one another in transformation and processing methods.
Pork is what is mainly used in cured meats, but we can also find other excellent products consisting of white turkey or chicken meat, horse meat, beef or game.
Although they are not properly dietetic products, nowadays Italian cured meats production takes advantage of all the improvements made in terms of farming techniques, animal feeding and the choice of raw materials.
Cured meats in Italy and in the world: an ancient history
An inscription relating to a kind of salami was found on the tomb of Ramses III; even though it was in Classical Greece when the first sausages were produced, and we even find them mentioned in Aristophanes’ plays.
In Italy, the first processed forms of sausages appeared during the Roman Empire: we can find references of that in the work of Cato the Censor, Juvenal and Horace – in his “Satires”. Meat – either pork or wild boar – was salted and stored in wooden barrels.
It seems that Romans were so fond of ham that, according to Varro, they also imported it from Cisalpine Gaul. Even the very appreciated mortadella was born in the late Roman period in ancient Bononia and was originally made of pork and myrtle.
We find the first mentions to cured meats in the Middle Ages, with reference to salt-preserved products. However, it was only in the Renaissance when the first pork butcheries – called “norcinerie”- were born together with the Corporations which were responsible for regulating the production of cured meats. Cardinal Girolamo Farnese himself decreed which meats and spices should be used in making them.
In the 19th century the first semi-artisanal workshops were opened, but it was only in the 60s when cured meat factories (salumifici