While today “eating on the go” usually means fast food or whatever we can grab at stop for petrol, in the past (i.e. pre-highway), this meant travelling with foods that could sustain us on our journey. And few foods define tasty, portable, and sustaining quite like – salami. Regardless of whether you are planning a Nordic saga, crossing the Balkans, or simply trying to make your meat last in a Mediterranean climate, salami has been the cured meat of choice.
Our word salami comes from the Italian salame, meaning “spiced pork sausage;” however both the terms salami and sausage have the same Latin origin: sal, meaning “salt”. While we can not say with any degree of certainty when what we think of as a salami today finally became associated with the term, legend has it that salami originated in a small fishing village called Salamis in Cyprus around 700 BC. Whether or not you believe this legend, salami and its other European cousins – sausage and cured meats, played a significant factor in supplying the foodstuffs necessary for European civilisation, colonisation, and trade.
Definition – salami
Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, the true definition of what makes a salami specifically a salami became muddled to the point where, currently, we tend to lump the term in with sausage and other cured meats without realising or understanding the difference. Though all 3 do employ the use of salt, it is in the production methods where we can differentiate. For example, cured meats, such as prosciutto, are often just whole pieces of meat with the addition of salt and spices, sausage and salami involving grinding and encasing the meat with fat, salt, and spices. What separates salami from sausage is that sausage usually involves some sort of cooking process, whereas our term typically involves a much longer ageing/curing process.
The term’s first known use in English comes from Ida Pfeiffer’s 1852 work, Journey to Iceland, where she writes, quite simply, “White bread and salami!” Using the travelling spirit previously mentioned, a 1937 piece from the magazine Time and Tide remarked that, “Everyone carried a basket with their food for the day—red wine, long rolls of bread, salami, cherries.” So, wherever you find yourself on a journey or a picnic, perhaps you may consider leaving behind the world of burgers and fries and, much like our ancestors, enjoy the timeless pleasure of several pieces of salami.
