Mortadella and American bologna are not the same thing: the two rulebooks, line by line

The specification in force, published in Italy's Official Journal on 22 June 2022, starts from four things: pork from striated muscle, cubes of jowl fat, salt and pepper. Everything else sits on a list of optional ingredients, and the list is closed.

It covers pork tripe, hard pork fat, water «according to good industrial practice», natural flavourings up to 0.3% of the mix, spices and aromatic herbs, pistachios, sugar up to 0.5%, sodium or potassium nitrite up to 140 ppm, and ascorbic acid with its sodium salt. Pistachios, in other words, are allowed and not required: mortadella with or without them can be IGP just the same.

Then come the written bans: smoke flavourings, polyphosphates, processing aids, anything that affects colour even as a side effect, and mechanically separated meat. And there is what the text simply does not mention, such as starch, milk proteins, caseinates or soy. No line bans them one by one. They are not provided for, and on a closed list that amounts to the same thing.

One detail even labels get wrong: the registered name is «Mortadella Bologna», with no «di».

The processing rules are few and precise. The meat goes through a grinder with at least one plate whose holes are no wider than 0.9 mm, which is where the fine texture comes from. The fat cubes are heated, washed and drained before going into the mix.

Cooking happens in dry-air ovens, and the specification fixes the temperature of the product rather than the oven: the core must reach at least 70 °C. Rapid cooling to below 10 °C at the core follows, and total weight loss must be at least 3%.

The finished product is held to analytical limits: at least 14.5% protein, at most 2.8% salt, a pH of at least 6, and three ratios, namely collagen to protein no higher than 0.18, water to protein no higher than 4.10 and fat to protein no higher than 2. In the slice, the fat cubes must make up at least 15% of the mass. There is no absolute cap on fat: the limit is its ratio to protein.

As for geography, the name misleads. The zone covers Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, Tuscany, Marche, Lazio and the province of Trento, and every stage must happen inside it, slicing and packing included. The consortium reports 40.7 million kilos produced in 2025, with about a quarter of sales abroad; for 2024, against the roughly 39 million the consortium cites, the Ismea-Qualivita report records 35,533 tonnes of certified production. They measure different things and should be quoted by name.

The 2022 specification allows sodium or potassium nitrite up to 140 ppm. Since 9 October 2025, however, the EU additives regulation has lowered the limit for heat-treated meat products to 80 mg per kilo added, expressed as nitrite ion, down from 150 expressed as sodium nitrite. The regulation makes no exception for mortadella.

A product has to comply with both rules, so the stricter one applies. The specification does not say in what form its ceiling is expressed, and an exact comparison between the two numbers depends on precisely that: it is an open question worth putting to the consortium.

In the United States bologna has no consortium specification. It has a federal standard of identity, 9 CFR 319.180, the same one that covers frankfurters and hot dogs. It defines bologna as a cooked, comminuted sausage made from one or more skeletal muscle meats, to which poultry may be added, smoked or not.

The numbers that matter are these. Fat at most 30%, and fat plus added water at most 40%. Poultry, including mechanically separated poultry, up to 15% of the ingredients, excluding water. Binders and extenders such as cereal, soy flour, dry milk, starch or whey up to 3.5%, declared on the label; isolated soy protein and sodium caseinate up to 2%. Phosphates up to 0.5%, nitrite up to 200 ppm in the finished product, and mechanically separated pork up to 20% of the meat portion.

There is also a «with byproducts» or «with variety meats» version, in which skeletal muscle meat can drop to 15% and the rest can come from hearts, tongues, stomachs, tripe, spleens and other parts the rule lists. Here the law asks for transparency: the phrase must sit next to the name, and each byproduct must be named. If the meat comes from a single species, the species goes into the name, as in «beef bologna».

The standard sets no cooking temperature and no production zone. It is simply a different way of regulating a product: instead of a closed list, a set of limits plus the duty to declare on the label what is inside.

The city's name entered English through the sausage. «Bologna sausage» appears around 1590, «bologna» on its own is recorded from 1849, and «baloney», the spelling of the popular pronunciation, from 1894. Since 1922 the word has also meant nonsense, a sense popularised in the early 1930s by former New York governor Al Smith.

In Bologna, meanwhile, the rule on the meat had been written down for centuries. On 24 October 1661 Cardinal Farnese, the papal legate, issued a decree on the making of mortadella and salami that banned any meat other than pork and reserved the trade to the salt-curers' guild, with inspections, a seal and a tally of quantities sold. The pork-only rule in the current specification has more than three and a half centuries behind it.

For many years Italian mortadella could not enter the United States, and the reason was veterinary. For pork from regions affected by swine vesicular disease, US authorities required a moist-heat treatment at 69 °C, which mortadella, cooked in dry air, does not use.

The turning point was a US Department of Agriculture rule published on 10 January 2000 and in force from 9 February. It introduced a dry-cooking method, with boneless meat baked for at least ten hours to a core temperature of at least 65 °C, and it names Italian mortadella producers explicitly. The request, according to the proposal published the year before, came from the Italian government. According to NPR, which reported the change, the ban had been in place since 1967.

In 2013 the United States went on to recognise Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Piedmont and the provinces of Trento and Bolzano as free of the disease. Another version circulates widely, blaming the ban on African swine fever: the federal documents of those years name a different disease.

In Italy the word covers very different products. Mortadella di Prato is itself an IGP, registered in 2016, with a specification that calls for alchermes liqueur, between 0.3 and 0.6%, and garlic, and steam cooking for nine to thirteen hours to a core of 70-72 °C.

Mortadella di Campotosto, from Abruzzo, is not even cooked: it is a raw cured salume with a strip of lard at its centre, smoked for about fifteen days and aged for at least two months. It is a Slow Food Presidium with only two producers, and on Italy's national list of traditional products it also appears under a far earthier folk name. Mortadella di Amatrice, known as marotta, is something else again: loin and shoulder with lard, aged four to five months.

The same list records buffalo, horse and Maremma beef mortadellas in Lazio, and liver mortadellas in Lombardy and Piedmont. «Mortadella is pork» holds for the two IGPs, not for everything that carries the name.

In Italy the first check is the name, «Mortadella Bologna», with the EU IGP logo. The second is the ingredient list, which for the IGP can only contain the permitted items. If starch, milk proteins, soy or polyphosphates appear, the product is generic mortadella: legitimate, but different.

In the United States, bologna can be read entirely from its label. The species, if there is only one, is in the name; binders are declared; «with byproducts» or «with variety meats» tells you there is offal, and which. US law requires those details to be printed, and they make the comparison possible for anyone.