ByL Tamara Holt
*But first, what, exactly, is it?
Salami is chunks of beef and fat ground up and mixed with salt and spices, stuffed in a casing, then cooked or smoked or both. And more than that, salami is part of our heritage, a food we all know and love. In our first taste test, Jewish Living looks at the history and traditions of salami, and asks a panel of experts to tell us which are the best.
Where there is grassland, there is livestock. Where there is livestock, there is sausage. It's part of human civilization," says Roger Horowitz, author of Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation. Salami is a type of sausage, one that's cured with salt and cooked, smoked, dried, or a combination thereof. Such processing was a logical answer to the two big questions that follow butchering a bull: "What do I do with all this meat?" and "How can I keep it from spoiling?"
Today, our salami, bologna, and franks are packed mostly in manmade casings, but traditionally they were stuffed into the animal's intestine. The perfect package for scraps and an ideal way of making them into a consistent size and shape for cooking, curing, or drying,
"It's as if the animal was setting us up for salami," says Horowitz.
Sausage has been traced back thousands of years, even appearing in Homer's Odyssey. But the earliest sausage citation is from Sumeria, the oldest known civilization, around 3000 b.c.e. That area is now southern Iraq, the location of the city of Ur, which may have been Abraham's hometown and where he first spoke to God about going forth to beget the Jewish people. So if it was an ancestor of Abraham's who made the first sausage, and Abraham is the father of the Jewish people. . . well, there you go. Jews have been eating the stuff since before they were Jews.
For Kosher salami, as we know it now, recent history is most relevant. Unlike many of our Jewish food traditions, kosher salami didn't arrive in America with the wave of Eastern European immigrants of the 1880s; they didn't have the grassland or enough cash for that much meat. Beef sausage sailed to our shores in the first half of the 19th century with urban, educated, middle-class German Jews, who made and sold kosher versions of what in Germany was known as wurst.
The word "salami" is most likely from the Latin "sal," for salt, and salt is all that's needed to preserve meat for a long time. We salt it when we're koshering, so why not keep it salted, add some spices, make it into a log, and keep it on hand for months?
Piling on
David Sax visited some 200 delis in North America and Europe while researching his upcoming book, Save the Deli. Along the way, he discovered the naked truth about salami sandwiches: They are usually just bread, mustard, and meat and less likely to be ordered in a deli than made at home. (Delis are better known for their hot meats, he says.) But Sax did help us find three delis justifiably famous for their grilled salami sandwiches. Find out more about his deli favorites at www.savethedeli.com. Then send us your choices of top delis and sandwiches to letters@jewishlivingmag.com.
