Sopressata di Campania

Antonio, my Italian tutor and very good friend, went home to Italy to spend the holidays with his family. Antonio is from a small town in the hills just north of Salerno in the southern Italian region of Campania.

On Friday Antonio showed up for our first class of the new year with a torpedo shaped object wrapped in aluminum foil. It was a sopressata salami made by Antonio's father from a pig their family had slaughtered at the beginning of last year. As Antonio told it, this was the last sopressata the family had from last year's production and he had to wrest if from them to bring it back to share with me. His efforts were most appreciated, especially when I showed him the story from last week's Wall Street Journal - "Bringing Home the Bacon Gets Tougher in the Age of Terror."

I tried Antonio's gift yesterday. It was fantastic, from the standpoint of both flavor and texture!


Although it may be difficult to replicate the product made by Antonio's dad, here is an interesting blog entry reporting on an effort to make sopressata.