No More Smuggling: Many Cured Italian Meats Coming To America
American gourmets and lovers of Italian food products, your days as food smugglers as over.
No more stuffing your suitcases with delicacies bought in Italy, hoping the sniffer dogs at JFK or other American airports won't detect the banned-in-the-USA foodstuffs inside your luggage.
In the U.S., they're called cured meats, the French say charcuterie and in Italy, the word for cured-pork products is salumi.
Starting May 28, a four-decades-old ban on the import of many Italian salumi will be lifted.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that the Italian regions of Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto and Piedmont, and the provinces of Trento and Bolzano, are free of swine vesicular disease. Imports of pork products from those areas, says USDA, present a low risk of introducing the disease into the U.S. The disease was first detected in the 1960s and can survive cooking and even long curing.
Up to now, only few Italian pork products were approved for import to the U.S.: prosciutto di Parma and prosciutto di San Daniele, as well as mortadella — which was also banned until 2000.
Starting soon, as long as they receive USDA approval, hundreds of artisanal products will arrive on American tables. However, it's not yet clear what standards the producers will have to meet and what the costs will be. But even without a ban, Italian cured meat producers must pay hefty fees as part of the process of getting certified for importation.
For centuries, Italians have been making some of the highest-quality cured meats in Europe. It's time to start learning some of their names: sopressata, a slow-cured dried pork, similar in appearance to salami; pancetta, bacon made from the pork belly, but unlike the American variety, which is smoked, Italian pancetta is cured in salt and spices. Coppa or capocollo, made from pork shoulder or neck and seasoned with wine, salt and spice.
What's the secret behind the high quality of Italian salumi?
Many say it's the quality of the pigs, the climate where they're raised and what they're fed.
Every Italian region and province, and even many towns have their own distinctive salumi, many of them celebrated in week-long folk festivals. There are fans of Coppa Piacentina or those who swear by Coppa di Parma; there's an infinite variety of salamis — from Brianza, Vicenza, Cremona and many more, spiced with garlic, juniper and myrtle berries, fennel and red wine.
One of the delicacies that may soon reach U.S. shores is salame di Felino, named after the small town of the same name near Parma.
According to the website prosciuttopedia, salame di Felino traces its origins to the Middle Ages. The oldest pictorial representation is found in the Parma Baptistery, where one can see two salamis draped over a saucepan. And in 1905, the wording "Salame di Felino" was officially included in the dictionary of the Italian language.
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