Mortadella di Campotosto

Mortadella di Campotosto is a raw, cured pork salume of 300 to 400 grams, made from finely ground lean pork with a stick of salted lard inserted lengthways through the middle. Cut across, every slice shows a white square eye at the centre of a dark red ring. It is lightly cold-smoked and aged for two to four months.

The name misleads and is worth correcting immediately. There is no relationship to mortadella from Bologna, which is cooked, enormous, finely emulsified and studded with fat cubes throughout. This one is raw, tiny, smoked and has a single central core of fat. The word mortadella originally meant nothing more than meat pounded in a mortar, and it ended up attached to very different products.

In Campotosto and across the surrounding mountains they are called coglioni di mulo (mule's testicles) for their shape and for the way they are sold, two pieces tied together and hung over a rod. The name is crude, universally used and printed on some producers' labels.

Production is tiny in every sense: a handful of makers, all in the municipality of Campotosto and its hamlets, working a tradition that the 2016–2017 earthquakes badly disrupted. It is listed among Abruzzo's traditional regional food products.

Lean, savoury and gently smoky, with a rush of soft fat in the middle of every bite. The outer ring of meat is dense and dry, closer in texture to a hard salami or to bresaola than to anything soft, and it carries black pepper and a restrained beechwood smoke.

The centre is the point. The bar of lard turns translucent during ageing and melts against the tongue, and the contrast between dry cured meat and pure soft fat is what the whole product is engineered to deliver. Slice it thin and you lose the effect entirely.

There is no chilli, which surprises people who associate Abruzzo with heat, and no sweetness. Well-made pieces taste of pork, pepper, mountain air and a little woodsmoke, in that order, with the smoke sitting behind rather than in front.

Cut it by knife, across the axis, five to eight millimetres thick, so the bar of lard stays whole inside each slice. Thin slicing destroys the product: the contrast between dry smoked meat and melting fat is the entire experience.

Eat it raw at room temperature, with rustic sourdough bread. Do not trim the fat out: it carries the pepper and the smoke, and it is the reason the meat around it stays edible after four months of drying.

On a board it belongs with Abruzzo sheep's cheeses, caciocavallo, olives and pickled vegetables. It is rarely cooked, but a couple of slices diced into a soffritto make an excellent base for spaghetti alla chitarra or a lentil soup.

Take it out of the fridge twenty minutes before serving. Cold lard is waxy and tasteless, and that alone accounts for most disappointing first encounters with this salume.

Whole, it hangs in a cool, ventilated place between about 8 and 15 °C, where it goes on drying slowly and the lean tightens. In the fridge it wants greaseproof paper or a tea towel: cling film against the casing makes it sweat and mutes the smoke. Once cut into, reckon on ten to fifteen days, covering only the cut face. The pieces are small enough that this rarely becomes a question.

Vacuum packs hold four to six months to the date printed on them, but open one and let it breathe for a day or two, because the vacuum compresses the smoke and leaves a shut in smell that clears in air. The lardo down the middle is the critical part, since fat oxidises well before lean meat does: a smell of paint or old walnuts, or a bar that has gone deep yellow, is that change under way, and at that point the date on the pack and the producer are the reference. Freezing whole for three months is possible and not advised: the lardo releases water as it thaws and loses the buttery texture the sausage exists for.

Forget everything the word mortadella means in English. This is not the pale pink Bologna deli meat: it is a small cured pork sausage, oval and elongated, sold in tied pairs, with a casing that clings tight, slightly wrinkled and amber brown from the smoke. The proof is the cut face, where a white bar of lardo, square or rectangular in section, sits exactly at the centre of a ring of dark red, compact lean. Lardo that is off centre, broken up or missing altogether means the piece was not made the traditional way.

On the nose the smoke should be light and stay behind the meat and the pepper; a pungent smoked smell points to hot smoke or too long in the smokehouse, both outside the tradition and both flattening everything else. The lean is firm without being hard and the lardo is yielding, almost buttery. Lardo turned yellow, or a nutty smell coming off the fat, is oxidation, and the fat is the part that changes first. On the label look for Campotosto itself or its hamlets, Mascioni, Poggio Cancelli, Ortolano, and treat Campotosto style made elsewhere as a different product.

In Italy, from producers in Campotosto and its hamlets, or from good delicatessens in L'Aquila and across Abruzzo. A pair weighs 600 to 800 grams and costs 30 to 50 euro, which works out at 45 to 65 euro per kilo: high, and a direct consequence of tiny pieces, entirely manual work and very few makers.

Outside Italy it is scarce. US specialist importers reach 35 to 50 dollars per pound when they have it; UK Italian delicatessens ask 50 to 70 pounds per kilo. Several Campotosto producers ship within Italy and the EU, which is the sensible route for European buyers.

Check two things before paying: that the label names Campotosto or one of its hamlets rather than describing a 'Campotosto-style' product made elsewhere, and that the lard core is white rather than deep yellow. Fat ages faster than lean meat, and yellowing is the first sign of a piece that has sat too long.

Campotosto itself, at 1,300 metres inside the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga national park, where the village shops and the restaurants around the lake serve it with sheep's cheese and mountain potatoes. The lake is one of the largest artificial basins in Europe, built for hydroelectric power in the 1930s and 40s, and it freezes along the shore in winter; the area is good for birdwatching and cross-country skiing.

The hamlets of Mascioni, Poggio Cancelli and Ortolano, and the Laga villages running north to Amatrice, twenty kilometres away across the regional border in Lazio. A summer festival in Campotosto puts all the producers in one place. The area was hit hard by the 2016 and 2017 earthquakes, and buying here still carries that weight.

L'Aquila is forty minutes by road, and the Gran Sasso begins immediately beyond it: Campo Imperatore, Santo Stefano di Sessanio, the ruined castle at Rocca Calascio. It is a circuit that takes in this salume, mountain lentils, L'Aquila saffron and sheep's cheeses, which is most of the reason to come.