Pitina

Pitina is minced meat, mixed with pork fat and spices, pressed by hand into a flattened ball the size of a fist, rolled in cornmeal and hung in the chimney to smoke. Then it dries for thirty to sixty days. No casing, no mould, no press: none of the things that normally make a salume a salume.

That absence is the whole story. Italian charcuterie is built on the gut casing, which contains the mince, shields it and regulates how it loses moisture. Pitina solves the same problem with two substitutes: a shell of cornmeal that protects the surface, and hearth smoke that keeps it clean. The reason is economic. In the poor valleys of western Friuli there were very few pigs, and no pigs means no casings.

The meat was whatever the mountain provided: roe deer, chamois, red deer, or old sheep and goats at the end of their working lives. The fat had to come from a pig, because game is extremely lean and without fat the mixture will neither bind nor keep. The usual ratio today is four parts lean meat to one part lard or pancetta.

Slow Food created a Presidium to keep alive a production that had nearly disappeared by the 1990s, and in 2018 the name was recognised at European level as an IGP. There are still only around ten producers.

Wild, smoky and juniper-heavy, with a texture between a coarse salami and a firm terrine. The mince is medium-ground, so you feel individual grains of meat rather than a smooth paste, and small white specks of pork fat run through it.

Juniper is the signature. It comes through resinous and slightly bitter, the way it does in gin, and it is doing a job: it was the traditional way to soften the gaminess of roe deer and old mutton. Behind it are garlic, black pepper and wild fennel, and behind those the smoke, which is present but restrained.

The cornmeal crust adds a faint toasted note and a visual signature: every slice has a thin yellow rim around a dark red centre. Young pitina, eaten raw, is softer and more aromatic. Older pitina is drier and more concentrated, which is why the valley cooks it rather than slicing it.

Young pitina, under about forty days, is sliced thin with a sharp knife and eaten raw, like any cured sausage: a little olive oil and rye bread is all it needs.

Older pitina is drier and wants heat. The traditional Val Tramontina preparation is pitina all'aceto: bring water and vinegar to a simmer in a wide pan, drop in the slices for a minute or two, and serve them boiling hot over freshly poured polenta. The acid cuts the fat, the heat softens the meat, and the polenta echoes the cornmeal crust.

The other classic is broth. Lower a whole pitina into simmering water with vegetables for half an hour, then slice it and serve it in its own broth with polenta alongside. That is Sunday lunch in the valley in winter.

Outside tradition, crumble it into a pasta sauce where it replaces sausage and adds smoke; float slices in a barley and bean soup; or dice it into scrambled eggs, which is the fastest way to understand what it does.

A whole pitina is a dried and smoked piece and keeps the way those do: hung in a cool, airy, dark place at around 10 to 14 C, loose rather than wrapped in plastic, where it goes on losing water for weeks. The ball shrinks and hardens from the outside in, the cornmeal coat dries and some of it flakes away, the surface darkens further, and the flavour concentrates toward smoke and salt. Younger ones slice thin; older ones are firm enough to be cut into cubes.

Once it is cut the exposed face is bare mince with no casing to protect it, so it dries fastest of anything on the piece. Cover just that face with paper, keep it at 0 to 4 C, and use it within a week or two; the surface will darken and form a rim that is trimmed before the next cut, and the fat shifts from white toward ivory as it oxidises. Vacuum packs carry a date from the producer, which is the reference for those. Freezing coarsens the fat and softens the texture, so it is not the usual route.

Nothing else on a counter looks like it. Pitina is a ball, slightly flattened, roughly the size of a fist and weighing between a hundred and three hundred grams, and it has no casing at all: the outside is a coat of yellow cornmeal pressed onto the surface, darkened where the smoke has worked on it. Pick it up and it smells of woodsmoke and juniper before anything else. Cut across, the mince is coarse and dark, red-brown rather than pink, flecked with white pork fat, with pepper, garlic and wild fennel through it. The IGP mark and the Friulian origin should be on the tag, along with the meat used, sheep, goat or game.

The local names shift by valley, so peta and petuccia are the same idea at different sizes. There is nothing abroad that stands in for it. Smoked sausages are in casings and industrially cured; game salami is a cylinder; a raw meatball is a raw meatball. Production is very small, most of it stays in the Pordenone valleys, and where it appears elsewhere it is priced accordingly and sold whole rather than sliced.

In Italy, buy it from producers in Tramonti di Sopra, Tramonti di Sotto, Meduno and the Val Colvera, or from serious delicatessens in Pordenone and Udine. Look for the Slow Food Presidium mark and for the declared meat: much of the commercial production now uses only mutton, which is cheaper and available year round.

Outside Italy it is close to unobtainable. When it appears through specialist importers it runs 24 to 34 dollars per pound in the US and 38 to 52 pounds per kilo in the UK. Several Val Tramontina producers ship within Italy and the EU, which is the practical route for European buyers.

One pitina weighs 200 to 300 grams and costs 9 to 15 euro at source. The larger peta from Meduno costs slightly less per kilo because it yields better; the small petuccia costs more and is eaten sooner.

The Val Tramontina, in the province of Pordenone, inside the Friulian Dolomites nature park. Tramonti di Sopra and Tramonti di Sotto sit on Lake Redona, a reservoir under which the old village lies, and in dry periods its bridge and cemetery reappear. Valley osterie serve pitina both raw and on polenta.

Around it, the Val Colvera with Frisanco and Poffabro, one of the best-preserved stone villages in Friuli; Meduno and Cavasso Nuovo, home of the larger peta; Andreis and Barcis on its turquoise lake; Claut and Erto e Casso above the Vajont dam. The whole production area fits inside a few dozen kilometres of mountain road.

Summer village festivals across the valley are the easiest way to taste several versions without tracking down producers one by one. It is roughly ninety minutes from Udine and two hours from Venice, and it sees a fraction of the visitors those cities do.