Ed Cumming

Not a load of baloney

Few sliced meats are more maligned than mortadella. The distinctive pink and white ham is a signature delicacy of Bologna in northern Italy; so much so that in America it – or the version that passes for it – is known simply as ‘bologna’. In the Italian city’s narrow and colonnaded old streets, fat sausages hang from the ceilings of delis and restaurants, bulging through their twine casings, ready to be plucked and put into sandwiches, layered on to pizzas or eaten straight out of the wrapper with a glass of lambrusco. The good stuff is a porcine treat. Bologna is sometimes called a red city for the colour of some of the buildings and its Leftist tendencies; when it comes to food it is in the pink.

Yet cheap, industrial mortadella, of the type many in Britain and the US had to put up with for years, can be a slick, fatty mess of reconstituted meat from miserable pigs, the colour of Pepto-bismol and hardly more pleasant to consume. It could be a poster boy for ultraprocessed foods. Traumatised by the cheap version, many people loathe mortadella. My wife will not touch the stuff. She calls it ‘war ham’.

There is a chasm between the good stuff and the bad. In London, some restaurants are helping to rehabilitate mortadella. Manteca in Shoreditch makes its own, while Nick Bramham serves a beautiful mortadella sandwich at Quality Wines. Salvatore and Matteo Aloe, the Bologna-based brothers behind the cult Italian pizzeria Berberè, which has outposts in Clapham and Kentish Town, want to educate Brits about their city’s preeminent sausage. They have launched a mortadella-topped pizza inspired by Bologna, and invited me to meet their mortadella supplier, Aldo Zivieri. ‘Artisanal mortadella is an emblem of what we like to do with our ingredients,’ Salvatore explains. ‘We want to give joy to everyone involved, while creating a culture of great products.’

In a small facility just outside Bologna, Zivieri makes mortadella in a manner that would have been familiar a thousand years ago, using rarebreed pigs raised on his own farm. First he grinds and regrinds pork shoulder to give an increasingly fine texture. Then he takes fattier meat, mostly from the throat, and renders the fat to remove impurities. The fat is mixed with the lean meat and together they are squeezed into natural casings, cooked and cooled. The only additives are salt, pepper and coriander seeds. One sometimes sees mortadella studded with greenbrown pistachios, but this is anathema to purists.

‘In the past, the labour involved in making mortadella meant that it was four times more expensive than cured ham, like prosciutto,’ Zivieri explains. Despite the increased cost, mortadella was so popular that in the 13th century, a quarter of the city’s population was engaged in producing it.

This made it a more tempting target for industrialisation than prosciutto. A factory can’t do much to change the process of curing a leg of pig, which still takes time, but it can wreak untold horrors in recombining parts of an animal. In cheap mortadella, Zivieri adds, its distinctive piggy smell is added chemically, ‘like a perfume’. I watch as the mixed meat and fat is squeezed into its casing, then deftly wrapped in twine. The resulting sausage is a beautiful product, worthy of any pizza, sandwich or just eating on its own. The old advice is wrong. Sometimes it is good to see how the sausage is made.

Heavenly ham: the right mortadella can be a thing of porcine beauty