Salami time! 

January in Tuscany is cold with short daylight hours, and, while the garden offers mostly winter greens like kale, swiss chard and black cabbage (cavolo nero), for those who own pigs there is plenty of action on the salami, prosciutto and cured meat front. Before refrigeration was widely used and salami industrially produced, animals were killed and the meat processed while the weather was cold, to prevent spoilage and disease. Today there are controlled temperatures in production facilities and industrial sausage is produced all year round.
 

The small farmers and country people who keep their own pigs and make their own sausage and salami still do it in the winter and the event is celebrated with friends and neighbors coming to help with the hard work. The pig will be killed before dawn, generally at an authorized facility. The carcass is brought home very early in the morningand they work all day to cut up and transform the meat into typical Tuscan cured products:  coppacola, finocchiona, salami, sopressata.  While the men work, the women cook big lunches and dinners with the fresh roasts and pork ribs and everyone talks about the days' work.

 

January is the last month for wild boar hunting, and after a boar is killed and gutted, it's hung in the cold and processed into roasts, salami and ground meat for ragu.Most of the meat goes into the chest freezer that all hunters now have in their cantina so that fresh boar meat is available all year long for cooking.  It's impossible to buy wild boar, so it's best to know a hunter or two with a freezer stocked full and a generous heart!   

 

Cinta Senese Pigs - our favorite little pigs