Zampone

Zampone is a cooking sausage, not a slicing salami. The filling is lean pork from the head, shoulder and jowl, ground with pork rind and fat, seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon and sometimes wine.

The casing is what names it: the front trotter of the pig, boned out and emptied but left whole, trotters and all. The filling is pushed in and the open end sewn shut.

Zampone Modena has held PGI status since 1999, protected alongside Cotechino Modena by the same consortium. The rules set the proportions of the mix, the permitted spices, the maximum share of rind and a production area covering Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont, Friuli, the Marche and a handful of other northern provinces.

Weights run from half a kilo to a kilo and a half, and it is sold in two forms: raw, which needs four hours of poaching, and pre-cooked, which needs twenty to thirty minutes of reheating. They are the same product at two stages, and the difference on the plate is real.

Rich, gelatinous and warmly spiced, closer to a French boudin or a very good pork pie filling than to anything sliced cold. Nutmeg and clove are the flavours you notice first, then pork fat, then salt.

The texture is the point. Ground rind melts during the long cook and turns to gelatine, binding the meat into something that holds a slice but yields immediately. The trotter skin around the outside goes soft and slightly translucent and is eaten with the slice.

It is a fatty dish and it knows it, which is why it is always served with something earthy and acidic: lentils dressed with a little vinegar, mostarda, horseradish.

Pre-cooked zampone tastes a shade more uniform and firmer than a raw one poached at home; the raw version has a better skin and a looser, more distinct filling.

For raw zampone, start the night before: twelve hours in cold water, changed once. It softens the skin and pulls out some salt.

Prick it with a toothpick under the trotters and along the sides, wrap it in a linen or cotton cloth and tie it, or use the cooking bag if one is supplied, then put it in plenty of cold water and bring it to the barest simmer. Four hours for a kilo, never at a rolling boil, which splits the casing.

Rest it ten minutes in its own water, unwrap, and slice a centimetre and a half thick with a very sharp knife, starting from the sewn end.

Pre-cooked zampone goes into simmering water in its unopened bag for twenty to thirty minutes. Do not open it early and do not microwave it: the skin turns to rubber.

Lentils are the canonical partner: Castelluccio or Onano lentils, cooked with celery, carrot, onion and a ladle of the cooking broth. Then mashed potato, buttered spinach, mostarda from Mantua or Cremona, and a few drops of traditional balsamic vinegar if you have it.

The cooking broth is worth keeping: strain it, chill it, lift the fat off and use it for the lentils or a risotto.

The raw vacuum-packed version keeps in the fridge to the date printed on it, usually a few weeks out, and once the pack is open it is meant for the pot within a couple of days: this is raw stuffed meat, not a cured salume, so it never hangs at room temperature. The precooked sealed one is the opposite, sitting in a cupboard for months until its own date. Both dates belong to the maker. Left too long, a raw one darkens where the fat meets the skin and the surface fat yellows.

It freezes in either state. Raw, still in its vacuum, six months at minus 18 C; cooked, keep it whole or in thick slices sitting in its own broth, which stops the surface drying and going grey. Cooked leftovers keep two or three days in the fridge and reheat in broth or over a bain-marie, never at full power in a microwave, which turns the skin rubbery. The cooking broth is worth straining and chilling: the fat rises and sets in a solid cap you can lift off, and what is under it cooks lentils.

On a raw zampone the skin should be pale and dry to the touch, with no dark patches and no tacky spots, and the stitching that closes the trotter has to be intact, since a dropped stitch means it will open in the pot. The label gives raw weight, and a one-kilo zampone feeds six to eight as a main course. Cut, a cooked one shows a compact bound mixture, pink, held together by its own gelatine, with the skin soft and translucent; a slice that crumbles had too little rind or was cooked wrong.

On the pack, the European IGP logo and a reference to the Consorzio Zampone Modena Cotechino Modena are the real guarantee. Plenty of generic zamponi exist, legal but another product. Read the ingredients: pork, rind, salt and spices with little else is the shape of a good one, while starches, milk proteins, generic flavourings or a high declared water content mark the budget end. Abroad, almost everything on the shelf is the precooked foil-wrapped kind that appears at Christmas, and the near neighbour is cotechino, the same mixture in a plain casing without the trotter.

In the US, pre-cooked Zampone Modena IGP is imported by Eataly, Gustiamo and Italian delis, appearing in quantity from November through January and thinning out afterwards. Expect roughly 10 to 20 dollars per pound. Raw zampone is very hard to find outside Italian butchers, since it is a fresh product.

In the UK, Italian delicatessens and online grocers stock the pre-cooked version seasonally at about 15 to 28 pounds per kilo, usually in 500 to 1000 gram vacuum packs.

Check for the EU PGI symbol and the consortium mark for Zampone Modena. Plenty of generic zampone exists; it is legal and often cheaper, but the mix is looser and the ingredient list tells you why.

Read that list. A good zampone is pork, rind, salt and spices. Starches, milk proteins, generic "flavourings" and a high water percentage all point to a cheaper industrial product.

Order early if you want it for New Year's Eve: outside December it is largely a special-order item.

Modena and its province, where the historic delis of the centre and the producers around Castelnuovo Rangone, a town with a statue of a pig, sell raw zampone to order all winter.

Mirandola, in the northern plain of the province, claims to have invented it during the siege of 1511 and marks the connection with pork-centred food events.

Emilian trattorie run zampone with lentils and mashed potato as a fixture from December into January, and some keep it on into February. After that it disappears until the autumn.

It is worth widening the circle: Cremona has its own cotechino, Friuli eats musetto with brovada, turnips fermented in grape must, and Piacenza closes the loop with cappello del prete, the same forcemeat in yet another shape.