Salame d'Oca di Mortara

Salame d'oca di Mortara is a sausage made with goose meat, stuffed into the goose's own skin and sewn shut by hand. Two versions exist, and confusing them is the main problem for anyone looking for it.

The historic one is pure goose: no pork, salted and air-dried like a raw salami. It came out of the Jewish communities of the Po plain, where pork was excluded and geese, raised in numbers around the rice paddies, supplied both the meat and the fat that pork normally provides.

The second is the one you will actually find, and the one granted IGP status in 2004: roughly one third goose meat, one third lean pork and one third pork jowl fat, stuffed into goose skin, tied, and then cooked in water or steam for several hours. It is eaten cold or barely warm, in thick slices.

So, plainly: Salame d'Oca di Mortara IGP contains pork and is not kosher. Nor would the all-goose version be kosher by default, since kashrut requires ritual slaughter and rabbinic supervision, which commercial producers in Mortara do not have. Anyone who needs a compliant product should look for explicit certification rather than for this name.

Locally the mixed version is sometimes called ecumenico, ecumenical, because it brings together two food traditions that coexisted in the town for centuries. It is an affectionate and honest name: it describes a compromise, not a continuity.

Rich, mild and faintly gamey, much softer than the word salami suggests. The cooked version is closer in texture to a coarse mortadella or a French galantine than to a dry-cured sausage: it slices cleanly, holds together and yields easily, and the goose skin around each slice is chewy and savoury.

Goose fat is the flavour that carries everything. It is more delicate than pork fat, with a clean, buttery quality and a slight nuttiness, and it coats the mouth without feeling heavy. The seasoning stays quiet (salt, pepper, garlic, sometimes nutmeg) because the point is the bird.

The rare raw, all-goose version tastes quite different: drier, darker, more concentrated, with an unmistakable wild note that the pork in the modern recipe softens. If you have eaten cured duck breast, that is the register.

Cut the cooked version thick, seven or eight millimetres, and serve it at room temperature or slightly warmed. Straight from the fridge, goose fat is waxy and gives away nothing. Eat the skin: it is the best part.

In Mortara the standard accompaniment is plain: bread, butter and fruit mostarda, or pickled vegetables. On feast days it appears warm next to risotto, since this is rice country, or with mashed potato that soaks up the fat.

Warmed briefly in a pan with a splash of vinegar it becomes a main course, served over braised cabbage or lentils: one minute a side is enough, as it is already cooked.

The rare raw version is handled like any dry salami: thin slices, bread, a glass of red. It is leaner and more assertive, with the wild goose note that pork softens in the modern recipe.

The cooked salame, whole and vacuum sealed, keeps in the fridge for one to three months depending on the maker. Being cooked rather than cured it has a shorter life than a raw salame, and treating it like one is the standard mistake. Once opened, reckon on ten to fifteen days, wrapped in greaseproof paper in the least cold part of the fridge, with a sheet against the cut face so the exposed fat does not grey over. It freezes for around three months, better whole than sliced, and it wants a slow thaw in the fridge, since a fast one makes the fat weep and leaves the slice grainy.

The raw, cured version behaves like a pork salame. Hung somewhere cool it goes on maturing, in the fridge it wants a tea towel rather than plastic, and once cut into it is usually worked through in three or four weeks. One thing about both: goose fat oxidises faster than pork fat, so a smell of paint or old walnuts on the slice is that change happening, and there the date and the producer are the reference.

The cooked one wears the goose skin as its casing, with the stitching in plain view and a colour running from beige to gold. It is never a perfect cylinder, because skin follows its own folds. Cut it and the mix is pale pink with distinct white specks of jowl fat, ringed by the darker skin and a thin layer of fat beneath it, and the slice should hold together rather than fall apart, which is what happens when the cooking or pressing was approximate.

Read the ingredient list. Goose meat in first position with declared percentages is what counts, since plenty of things labelled goose salami abroad carry little goose and much pork. The IGP mark is what guarantees the proportion and the production area. The raw version is easy to tell apart: smaller, drier, dark red, without the glossy look of the cooked one. If you need it free of pork, that has to be stated on the label; where it is not, the question goes to the producer. It is not a liver product and has nothing to do with foie gras.

In Italy, from butchers in Mortara and across the Lomellina, and from delicatessens in Pavia and Milan. Read the ingredient list: the IGP guarantees roughly a third goose, while generic products sold as 'goose salami' can contain far less. If you need the all-goose version, order it ahead, because it is rarely on the counter.

Expect 26 to 38 euro per kilo at source for the cooked IGP, and 45 to 65 for the raw all-goose one. Whole pieces run 800 g to 1.5 kg.

Outside Italy it is close to unobtainable, partly because poultry products face tighter export rules. US specialist importers occasionally list it at 30 to 45 dollars per pound, UK Italian delicatessens at 42 to 60 pounds per kilo. European buyers are better off ordering direct from Mortara.

Mortara itself, where the old butchers in the centre make both versions and every trattoria puts goose salami on the antipasto plate. The Sagra del Salame d'Oca, on the last Sunday of September, fills the town with stalls and a historical procession, and is the easiest day to taste several producers side by side.

Across the Lomellina (Vigevano, Garlasco, Sannazzaro de' Burgondi, Parona) goose appears in every form: the salami, oca in onto preserved in its own fat, cracklings, smoked breast. Vigevano, with Bramante's Piazza Ducale and its Sforza castle, is the obvious sightseeing stop.

The Oltrepò Pavese wine country starts twenty minutes south, and Pavia with its Certosa is half an hour away. Mortara is under an hour from Milan by train or car, and almost no foreign visitors make the trip.