Mocetta

Mocetta (spelled motzetta in the region's Franco-Provençal dialect) is a whole muscle taken from the leg, boned out and trimmed of nearly all fat, dry-salted with a mixture of mountain herbs and hung to air-dry for two to four months. It is not stuffed into a casing, not smoked and not pressed. It is lean meat, salt, herbs and time.

The technique is shared across the Alps. What makes mocetta itself is the cure: juniper first and foremost, then sage, rosemary, garlic, bay and wild thyme, with some family recipes adding yarrow or mountain wormwood gathered above 1,500 metres. A slice smells of resin and undergrowth before it smells of meat, and that is precisely the line between mocetta and its better-known Lombard cousin, bresaola.

The original meat was whatever lived high up: ibex and chamois, taken in an era before hunting was regulated, when getting protein through an Alpine winter was a logistics problem rather than a culinary one. Ibex has been protected since 1922, the year Gran Paradiso became Italy's first national park, so ibex mocetta no longer legally exists. Today it is almost always beef (often from retired Valdostana dairy cows, whose meat is dark, lean and unusually savoury) or goat, which is rarer and considerably stronger. A handful of producers still work chamois or red deer sourced from controlled culls, in quantities that rarely leave the valley.

Deeply savoury and very clean, with a salt level that sits above prosciutto and below anchovy. The first thing that registers is juniper: piney, faintly bitter, almost gin-like. Sage and rosemary come in underneath, and only then does the beef itself arrive, dark and slightly mineral.

The texture is the surprise for anyone expecting jerky. Mocetta is not dehydrated, it is slowly dried, so the slices are silky and yielding rather than chewy. Cut paper-thin they are translucent and almost melt; cut too thick they turn leathery and the herbs dominate.

Goat mocetta is gamier, with a faint barnyard note the herbs frame rather than mask; try the beef first. The traditional serving with butter, rye bread and honey is not garnish: the fat and sweetness are structural, and mocetta eaten bare tastes considerably saltier than it should.

Serve it cold and raw, sliced as thinly as your knife or slicer allows, and take it out of the fridge twenty minutes before it reaches the table: refrigerator-cold mocetta tastes of nothing but salt.

The Valdostan plate is the benchmark and it is worth copying exactly: dark rye bread, good unsalted butter at room temperature, mocetta on top, a thread of chestnut or rhododendron honey, a few walnut halves. The butter blunts the salt, the honey answers the bitterness of the juniper, the walnut adds the tannin. Nothing there is decorative.

Beyond the board, treat it as a luxury carpaccio. Fan the slices on a cold plate with shavings of Fontina, olive oil and pepper; lay them over a chestnut soup so the heat just softens them; roll them around slices of tart apple with lamb's lettuce; fold them through warm pearl barley with butter and thyme.

Do not cook it. Heat drives off the volatile herb oils that justify the price and leaves you with dry, salty beef. The only accepted exception in the valley is draping slices over polenta straight off the fire.

Because the pieces are small, mocetta dries through much faster than a large salame, and the traditional handling reflects that: it hangs in a cool cellar at 10 to 14 C, and what it does there is keep shrinking, hardening and concentrating salt and juniper. Buy the amount you intend to use rather than a large piece, and if you have one whole, wrap it loosely in cloth and keep it cool and airy rather than sealed in plastic, where the herb crust goes damp and tacky.

Once cut, the lean face has almost no fat to slow it down. Cover the cut end with paper or cloth, keep the piece at 0 to 4 C, and expect the exposed surface to darken and harden over a week or two, with a rim that is pared off before the next slicing. Sliced meat changes fastest of all: laid out on a plate it turns from red to grey-brown at the edges within the hour, which is why it is cut at the last moment. Vacuum packs carry the producer's date. Freezing makes a muscle this lean floury on thawing.

Mocetta is small and dark, and both matter. It is a single lean muscle, rarely more than a couple of kilos, dried down to a compact piece whose outside is brown to almost black from the crust of salt and mountain herbs rubbed into it, juniper above all, with sage, bay, rosemary and garlic behind. Sliced very thin it is deep brick red, matte, with no marbling and only a trace of fat at the rim, and the smell arrives before the meat does. The label should name the animal: beef, goat, or in the rarer Valdostan versions chamois.

Bresaola is the obvious neighbour and the usual substitute: bigger, always beef, rounder in the slice, milder, and without the resinous herb note. Swiss bunderfleisch is pressed square. Biltong and jerky are cured with vinegar or sugar and dried far harder. Nothing in an ordinary supermarket sits close to it. Production is tiny even within the Aosta valley, so it is expensive by the hundred grams and the goat and chamois versions cost more again than the beef.

Very little mocetta leaves Valle d'Aosta and almost none leaves Italy. In Italy, buy it in Aosta itself (the shops along via Croix de Ville and via Porta Pretoria) or directly from butchers in Valpelline, Cogne, Gressoney and Saint-Rhémy-en-Bosses. Several Valdostan producers ship within the EU.

In the United States, expect to hunt. Import rules on cured beef are restrictive and the few importers carrying Valdostan products focus on Fontina DOP rather than salumi. When it appears it runs 28 to 38 dollars per pound. The realistic move is to buy bresaola from a good Italian grocer and dress it with juniper and sage yourself.

In the UK, Italian delicatessens with Alpine ranges occasionally list it at 42 to 58 pounds per kilo, but Swiss Bündnerfleisch is easier to find, genuinely close, and often cheaper. Buy a piece rather than pre-sliced packs: the herb aroma fades within a week of slicing.

Aosta first. The Fiera di Sant'Orso on 30 and 31 January fills the old town with a thousand craft stalls and brings down producers from the high valleys, which makes it the single best day of the year to taste versions that otherwise never move from the village where they are made.

Then the side valleys. Valpelline, which holds its seupa à la Valpellenentse festival in July; Arnad, which celebrates its DOP lard in August; Saint-Rhémy-en-Bosses under the Great St Bernard pass; Gressoney in the Lys valley, where the Walser community has its own meat-curing tradition; Cogne at the gate of Gran Paradiso national park.

Mountain refuges and agriturismi across the region serve the tagliere valdostano (mocetta, lard, jambon, alpine Fontina, dark bread) and at that altitude the ingredients have usually travelled a few kilometres at most. It is the context the food was designed for, and it tastes measurably better in it.