At the University of Bologna in 1661, a professor of astronomy named Ovidio Montalbani expanded his cosmic investigations to include a heavenly body known by its rosy cast and Rubenesque proportions. "Mortadella," he wrote of his city's culinary miracle, a giant sausage that was famous around the world, "is the noblest of all pork products."
Since Montalbani's day, mortadella has had its share of ups and downs, particularly in the United States. About 100 years ago, it inspired a homegrown knockoff named after its home city: the familiar bologna, or baloney, a staple of grammar-school lunch boxes and sing-along Oscar Mayer commercials. Mortadella's association with this spongy, one-dimensional lunch meat diminished its proud reputation. Next came a domestic ban on mortadella that began in 1967 following an outbreak of African swine fever across Italy. American authorities halted all imports of the zaftig beauties until the year 2000.
But despite such indignities, mortadella — a finely textured, delicately seasoned pork sausage studded with pearly globules of fat called lardelli, whole peppercorns, and sometimes pistachios — retains a storied lineage, going back to the writings of Boccaccio and Pliny the Elder. There was even a 1971 motion picture, La Mortadella, which starred Sophia Loren as an Italian girl who tries to slip past customs at JFK with a gift-wrapped, watermelon-sized specimen.
La Mortadella suggested a gulf of misunderstanding between Italy and America, one that may now finally be closing. In 2006, an article ran in the Corriere della Sera under the headline "Mortadella Chic"; it told of well-heeled Milanese washing down mortadella with €500 bottles of Champagne. Soon enough, the phenomenon jumped across the Atlantic, as paper-thin slices of delicate pork goodness began to take center position (alongside the likes of prosciutto, soppressata, and bresaola) on salumi plates all over New York. Best of all, it turns out that much of mortadella's stateside resurgence is powered by skilled American sausage makers, especially on the West Coast.
"It's a real monument, this particular salumi," Paul Bertolli said during a tour of his state-of-the-art facility in Berkeley, California. With his Clark Kent?ish demeanor, Bertolli — the former chef at Chez Panisse and at his own celebrated restaurant, Oliveto — is the quiet superhero of American gastronomy. He launched his Fra' Mani Handcrafted Salumi operation (framani.com) — which also produces remarkable soppressata and Tuscan-style dry aged sausages — in March 2006.
Bertolli explained that the word mortadella comes from the fact that early makers prepared pork for the giant sausage with a pestle and a special mortar — namely, a mortaio della carne di maiale. After actually attempting to create mortadella with a mortar and pestle — and other methods, notably the fabulous slow-poached kitchen version outlined in his indispensable 2003 book, Cooking by Hand — Bertolli alighted upon a technique for executing artisanal-style mortadella that could be produced according to the strictest current standards upheld in Bologna itself. "I drew up a little schema," he said, as he produced what looked alarmingly like a chemistry-class handout and proceeded to describe the difference between an emulsion—the old-school method in which fat and liquid are bound by protein (as in a mayonnaise) — and a comminution, or triturazione in Italian: a particle-reduction procedure in which fresh pork is ground at low temperatures through cappellini-thin apertures of .9 millimeters.
