In the Italian-American tradition that Volpi was founded on, two terms are used frequently: Salami Vs. Salumi. They are closely related and often confuse people early on in their charcuterie journey. Let’s break down the meaning of both of these words borne from traditions. 

What is Salami?

You’re likely not a stranger to Salami. Maybe you’ve ordered it on an Italian sandwich from your favorite sub shop, or you have seen logs around the deli case of the local supermarket. It is a food product that has effectively made it to the mainstream of American culinary culture.

Speaking broadly, Salami is a cured meat product that is made up of ground pork: the meat is minced, seasoned to the salumiere’s style and preference, and packed into a casing. It is then cured over time to develop and mature the signature flavors.

Salami can be produced with a wide swathe of flavors depending on the seasonings applied before curing. These changes produce interesting regional varieties like Genoa, Felino, and Finnochiona Salami.

What is Salumi?

Salumi is likely the term that you’re less familiar with. That’s expected given that it’s a term that refers to a variety of different products. Both Salami and Salumi derive from the root word Salume. This is an Italian term that refers to a very broad category of Italian artisan preserved meats, similar to the broadly adopted French term, charcuterie.

Salumi refers exclusively to those artisan craft meats that are made of pork. Italian Tradition uses all parts of the hog – from snout to tail – to create delicacies like Pancetta and Guanciale. Salami falls under the category, but so do many other foods like Prosciutto, Coppa, or Sopressata. 

Conclusion

These types of artisan meats have a long history. Since they’ve made the journey from Italy to the US and around the globe, some of the ways we talk about them have changed, but the thing that doesn’t change is the tradition behind it all.

Volpi still embodies the ideals of the craft by focusing on producing high-quality Salumi and Sliced Salami in small batches, using traditional ingredients with no nitrites or nitrates, and focusing on delivering premium flavor, from our family to yours.

Ladies and gentlemen it’s Voices From The Fog! Welcome to the history of cured meat brought to you by Volpi Foods. Today we are changing gears a bit and focusing not on meat, but the people behind the meat. It’s also about this thing that human beings do naturally and do best. The United States is the strange, wonderful petri dish for this thing. The thing is leaving your home and the longing that comes from that and then creating it all again wherever you end up. It’s the way that your family, my family, every family really, has come from at least one iteration of that desire to leave home and create a new one.

Learn More About Our Heritage >

This is How The Volpi Family Did it:

It was the year 1900 and a young Italian named John Volpi left Milan to take the leap faith many were taking back then. He came to the United States. Finding himself in the Midwest, he was immediately greeted by something familiar (albeit smelly) — livestock. John Volpi saw the pigs and cattle and thought “Ah yes, this I know”.

John was a master salumiere — that’s a cured meat expert to you and me. He wasn’t going to settle and just be a butcher chopping boring old steaks and pork chops. John began recreating the well-spiced and expertly cured meats of his native Italy. The ties that Volpi kept to the homeland not only kept his Italian-American products traditional, but they also resulted in the emigration of his nephew — a little Italian boy named Armando Pesetas. What do you get when you mix a master salumiere and an apprentice? Two salumieri! It’s a boring joke because there’s no surprise, but what you get is a young man with a dream and a boat ticket teaching another young man with a dream and a boat ticket about the place they both left behind.

In 1957 after John Volpi passing, Armando takes over and keeps close contact with his family and the curing practices of his people. As the 70s and 80s roll by, the haircuts and clothes become sillier and the music louder, but Volpi’s cured meat remains unscathed by these fleeting fads. The Volpi company expands throughout the US and the globe.

Years later it’s 2002 and Armando, the former student, finds himself in the position of his mentor and passes the business to his daughter Lorenza pasady who is known as a technical maestro in the world of curing quality meat. It seems here that there’s this interwoven connection between the extremes of getting the hell away from where you came from, while also holding on for dear life to some kind of history. It’s the root of the bittersweet and the root of almost every great myth and story ever told. Lucky for us, at least in the Volpi case, it’s the root of really good food.

Volpi Foods — American crafted since 1902.

Ladies and gentlemen it’s Voices From The Fog! Welcome to the history of Prosciutto brought to you by Volpi Foods. While some myths can be traced to humbler origins, and even connected with other cultures’ myths, the story of Prosciutto is so simple and so ridiculous that it bears a quick review.

A Roman Pig Story

Word has it that thousands of years ago the Romans had, amongst its many residents of the livestock persuasion, a happy pig named Franco. Now there’s our first problem right there, no way that pig had a name. Anyway, little Franco was wandering out in Rome one day… Hold up! A pig, which is a food animal usually confined to a pen and probably worth a pretty penny back then, is out in the streets of Rome like a tourist in heels, dangling hat, bags and garment bags from the hottest local clothiers?

Resuming… Franco is getting a little long in the tooth. Dang it! What pig has ever had a chance to get old? I suppose as Socrates famously said “Don’t let facts screw up a good story” also the guy who brought us “What’s that over there?” So our little curly-tailed friend Franco is wearing his Italian glasses from a Fellini movie and walking through the forum contemplating his small pig existence amongst the great universal expanse. He knows it is time for him to meet his maker and he climbs all seven of the Seven Hills and hits the beach.

He wanders in to dip his hooves, feeling the coolness of the ocean for the first time and smelling the freshness and salinity all around. As he dips into the watery blue fathoms of the sea, Franco draws his final breath and expires. After spending over a year as a dead pig and eventually washing up on the beach, some industrious peasants eventually stumble upon Franco’s petrified carcass and have a bite. Prosciutto was born! Isn’t myth so much better than a neglectful farmer who lost his pig, let it drown and some hobo is resorted to eating the bloated carcass, shrugged, and said “Yeah not bad”?

Volpi Foods — American crafted since 1902.

Ladies and gentlemen it’s Voices From The Fog! Welcome to the history of culatello brought to you by Volpi Foods. A little background on culatello. Like all good things, it comes from squalor and the greater human discovery of deliciousness through survival. Although it took a while, culatello made its way into the dainty and beloved hands of the aristocracy. Now, the serfs who invented it continued to eat their culatello at a reasonable cost and eat a peasant bread called misery. Yes, they had no illusions about their place in the world.

Composer of Music and Fine Meats

Famed composer Giuseppe Verdi grew up in Busseto, a town near Parma and the official home of culatello. He was an apt and able thirteen-year-old student of music and immersed in this beautiful little cobble street town that now serves as a beacon for all things Verdi and culatello.

This master of opera came of age as the child of well-to-do landowners near the Baratta Salumeria that even had an old windmill nearby fitted to age culatello. It doesn’t seem that surprising that as he became popular, he hid his privileged background and continued to frequent the Baratta Salumeria and sit and eat his favorite culatello with the kinds of people who created it. By the way, Giuseppe lived into his late 80s and although I’m not a doctor, I’m gonna say it was all the salty meat. Taking a step back in history, culatello was earliest mentioned in 1735 in a manual that kinda served as the Blue Book for porcine prices. Only 19 cents for three-quarters of a pound, not shabby! But I think that was still like $10-$60 bucks today… I don’t know. Speaking of today, a USDA ban that started in 1963 and lasted 50 years, ended not long ago. Let’s hope the future brings ships stacked to the brim with this awesome sliced ribbon thin beauty of the cured meats world. We salute you culatello!

Ladies and gentlemen it’s Voices From The Fog! Welcome to the history of fermentation brought to you by Volpi Foods. It’s more interesting than it sounds, I promise. Much like the curing process, using fire to cook food or accidentally eating the wrong mushrooms, fermentation was this fascinating natural process going on whether we simple little humans happen to take part or not. Our subject today is what humans have done with this process in which bacteria take sugars and turn them into any number of things like gas, acid, or what you may know it for best — alcohol. I got news for you sunny, you see that pickle you’re so delicately applying to that Italian hoagie with Genoa and Mortadella? Or how about that provolone so elegantly draped over a said sandwich?

Also, fermented. *mind-blown*

Let’s Sail Back in Time to Early Fermenting Days:

Picture two distinguished gentlemen. They’re about to invent the hangover:

So one guy says “Dang look at all these rotten grapes that ended up all over the ground. Guy! You were on grape watch!” 

His bud is like “They’re just a little squishy and moldy no biggie!” So they eat the grapes and get a funny head rush. 

A smarter person comes along and says “Just drink that mess guys. Run the grape gunk through my hat and mash it up good. Flash-forward 6000 years and we’ve evolved all the way to foot and bucket technology. Moving forward the Egyptians and their huge structure building slave population, those happy laborers that built the pyramids would each ration four to five liters of beer a day. This counted as a form of payment so the Egyptian government could classify them as employees and not interns thus avoiding the slave tax.

Sobering-up, CHEESE — the milk that keeps. No one knows exactly how fermentation first introduced cheese to the world but the legend ain’t bad. An Arabian merchant is set to cross the desert. He’s agreed to pay another merchant for some milk but failed to secure a plastic jug from anywhere in the world, yet he’s got a pouch made from a sheep’s stomach. He crosses the desert and does his nomadic sort of thing. When he gets to camp, he opens the pouch and takes a drink. Instead of throwing up, he finds the way to be quenching and the curds to be delectable. Cheese is still made this way accidentally, even today all over the world in lazy people’s refrigerators.

Final anecdote and shout out to Asia. Genghis Khan — a man who, like a yeast cell, converted people into acids, gases, and alcohol in the form of murdering them. He is noted for officially bringing sauerkraut to the West… so thanks I guess? But seriously Genghis, just because sauerkraut is awesome we’re not going to look the other way on you being an epic pillaging scumbag.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Voices From the Fog! Welcome to the history of curing meat brought to you by Volpi Foods. Curing is a natural process harnessed by humans to preserve meat. You take a hunk of meat, salt the bejesus out of it, hang it to dry for a long period and bada-boom prosciutto! Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s basically it. So there was a guy named Cato The Elder who lived in the mid-third century B.C. which is basically negative 250 B.C. — a point in time in which everyone was saying to themselves “I don’t know what we’re counting down to but the suspense is killing me”. Cato wasn’t just some wise old man, he was a military leader and powerful political figure known for censorship and his disdain of the overindulgent and hedonistic. But besides being kind of a prude about everything, he wrote things down from his farming manual, De Agricultura. He left a recipe from his ancestors simple past.

Cato The Elder’s Secret Recipe:

1. After buying legs of pork cut off the feet 
2. 1/2 peck ground Roman salt per ham 
3. Spread the salt in the base of a vat or jar 
4. Then place a ham with the skin facing downwards 
5. Cover completely with salt 
6. After standing in salt for 5 days, take all hams out with the salt 
7. Put those that were above below and so rearrange and replace 
8. After a total of 12 days, take out the hams, clean off the salt and hang in the fresh air for 2 days 
9. On the third day, take down and rub all over with oil 
10. Hang in smoke for two days
11. Take down and rub all over with a mixture of oil and vinegar and hang in the meat store (neither moths nor worms will attack it)

No flowery language necessary. It sounds delicious and has been a hit ever since. So after dying in his mid-80s, which is basically like living to be 300 years old today, Cato The Elder was eventually succeeded by heirs including Cato The Younger (who was undoubtedly given the least inventive name ever). While Cato The Younger has no such reputation in culinary prowess, he is famous for hating Caesars reign so much that he tried to commit suicide unsuccessfully with a sword only to finish the hack job by pulling his own guts out while the doctor was trying to sew him up. Hey Kaito! Take a cue from Brutus and point the pointy end at Caesar… Come on.