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ITALIAN FOOD
SALUMERIA
by
Alison Fensterstock
C
orreggio is a small,provincial hamlet in the Emilia-Romagna
region of Northern Italy — a lush, picturesque region in
the fertile Po river valley, beside the breathtaking landscape
of the Apennine mountain range. Giuseppe Verdi, the operatic
composer of
La Traviata
and
Aida
, was born in Emilia; so was
fashion designer Giorgio Armani, tenor star Luciano Pavarotti and
groundbreaking film director Federico Fellini. The area is famous
as the home of luxury racecar brands like Lamborghini, Maserati
and Ferrari. Perhaps less glamorously, it is also the birthplace of the
giant mortadella.
As Europe and the world at large recovered from the ravages of
the first World War, the five Veroni brothers did their part in little
Correggio. From their family’s small food shop in the town center,
they sold their neighbors the specialty cured meats that they crafted
carefully by hand according to family recipes and techniques. It was
a small thing, perhaps, but essential in its own way — to rebuild
community around familiar flavors and traditions. In 1925, the
Fratelli Veroni
— Fiorentino, Francesco, Paolo, Adolfo and Ugo —
officially established their company.Today,frommultiple production
facilities at home in Correggio and across Emilia-Romagna, the
Veroni descendants ship their products all over the world.
The brothers made a range of meats, from rich, marbled coppa
to salty, silky pancetta and spicy salami, all made with the same
attentive care (all still made today). But they did, according to
family lore, have one favorite specialty: mortadella, the soft, fatty,
bologna-like pork sausage flavored with black pepper, garlic and
tender green pistachios.The best way to make a signature mortadella
was a subject of rigorous debate during the business’s early years,
according to the official history of the company on its website. Each
brother had a different idea of what part of the recipe to tweak —
more salt? More pork fat? More nuts? — and the arguments would
last, literally, late into the night, exasperating spouses and other
family members who hadn’t caught the mortadella fever.
Finally, in 1930, they reached a consensus and a new goal. They
would make their special mortadella the biggest that anyone had
ever seen. The average mortadella weighed 12 kilograms and was
half a meter in length (about 26 pounds and 20 inches.) The giant
mortadella would surpass that by orders of magnitude, stretching
to eight meters in length and more than 2,000 kilograms.The plan
required much trial and error, from experimenting with ingredient
measures and cooking times to actually developing and building
new kitchen machinery that was capable of cooking and stuffing
such an ambitious sausage. But with perseverance, the five brothers
cracked the case, and the monster mortadella became the company’s
signature creation. Veroni even holds the Guinness World
Record for the largest mortadella, registering a win in 1994 with
a 2,030-kilogram product. Two years later, they broke their own
record, producing a whopper piece of meat that weighed in at 2,680
kilograms, or nearly 6,000 pounds. (That’s a lot of sandwiches.)
Sewing its casing, according to Veroni, took a group of seamstresses
two weeks of work; tying it required more than a kilometer of rope.
Most of us, to be sure, are unlikely to need a mortadella the size of two
Volkswagen Beetles, an adult hippopotamus or $120,000 in quarters.
But a company that would take the time to make that happen in the
first place — the idea, the debate, the endless tasting and testing, the
technological innovations, the teamwork, the ambition and the pride
in the final product — is surely a company whose customers need
never worry about how the sausage is made.