Italian Sausage

The very word sausage comes from the Latin salsus, salty proof indeed that the sausage was a method of preserving as well as a type of food, a very necessary adjunct to good living in the days before refrigerators. And Italians today are as fond of the sausage as they were in Pliny’s time.

A well-known Italian sausage, now so popular throughout the world that it is also produced in Germany, Hungary and the United States, is salame, generally made of lean pork, fat pork and beef, finely ground and highly seasoned, coloured with red wine and pickled in brine before it is air-dried. There is seemingly no end to the varieties of salame to be found in Italy today. Some are highly flavoured with garlic, others are mild; some are eaten fresh and others are considered to be at their best when they are most mature. A visit to any busy, crowded little salumeria in Rome - pungent-smelling shops with sausages of all sorts piled high in the windows and hung in stacks like church candles from the ceiling - will give you an immediate idea of the immense variety of salame, smoked and raw hams and sausages available.