Ferrara Salame with Sauce (Salama da Sugo)

History

Salama da sugo is a spiced, wine-cured pork specialty of Ferrara, in Emilia-Romagna. It blends humbler cuts of pork with red wine and warm spices — salt, pepper, garlic, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg — packed into a natural casing and aged for months, taking the segmented silhouette that identifies it.

Artusi gives it at no. 238, and he is plainly writing about a thing bought rather than made at home. These salami, he says, are a specialty of that town, shaped like *bondiole* and weighing about five hundred grams, sharp and appetising in flavour; unlike other cured meats of their kind they improve with age. To serve them, wash them several times in warm water to clean off the greasy film that covers them, then set them in plenty of cold water and boil them slowly for an hour and a half only, shut tight in a cloth so the skin does not burst. Serve them hot, with a garnish, as you would a *cotechino*.

Then he adds a dry aside that most accounts of this dish leave out: the sauce they are famous for sometimes does not appear at all, and if it does, it is not very copious.

The dish's Renaissance history — the 1492 mention, the letter of thanks from a Medici, the association with Lucrezia Borgia, the 1549 treatise said to describe the technique, and the modern protected-origin date — we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 500 g salama da sugo (Ferrara sauce-salame)
• water
• cloth

Instructions

1. Wash the well-aged salame several times in lukewarm water to remove its greasy film.
2. Wrap it tightly in a cloth and boil slowly in abundant cold water for only an hour and a half so the skin does not burst.
3. Serve hot with a garnish, like cotechino.