Every deli case has one: an enormous pale pink cylinder sitting at the end of the line, big enough that you start to wonder what it did to earn that much real estate. Most shoppers walk right past it on their way to the turkey, which is a shame, because mortadella has a longer paper trail than almost anything else behind that glass.

It has been counterfeited, regulated by a cardinal, written into the Decameron, and got into some drama with the United States government. All of that happened before it ever met a pistachio.

Conquest, Acorns, and a Scholarly Debate

Mortadella comes out of the countryside by Bononia (the ancient Roman name for the modern city of Bologna). It was founded by the Gallic Boii tribe after capturing and renaming the Etruscan city of Felsina. Those hills were covered in oak forests, the oaks dropped acorns, the acorns fed a very large population of pigs, and pigs eventually became mortadella.

Where the name “mortadella” comes from is less settled. One side traces it to mortarium, the Roman mortar used to pound pork into a paste. The other side points to farcimen myrtatum, a Roman sausage seasoned with myrtle berries. Both sides like to cite the same piece of evidence, an imperial-era stele in the Archaeological Museum of Bologna that shows seven pigs being led to pasture on one face and a mortar with its pestle on the other.

Bologna Lawyers Up

By the middle of the 14th century, mortadella had a reputation worth protecting. Italian writer and poet, Giovanni Boccaccio, worked a mention of mortadello into the closing pages of the Decameron (a book of 100 stories told by a group of ten young people sheltering from the Black Death), and by the 15th century the Visconti of Milan (a noble Italian family) were sending Bologna a fat ox every year in exchange for a supply of fragrant mortadelle, which is a genuinely excellent trade if you happen to be Bologna.

Guarding all of this fell to the Salaroli, the guild of salted meat vendors and one of the oldest in the city, which had already taken a mortar and pestle for its coat of arms by 1376. They applied the seals of guarantee and they lobbied hard against imitators (sound familiar?). On October 24, 1661, Cardinal Girolamo Farnese issued a proclamation that laid out how mortadella had to be made, most famously ruling that nothing but pork was allowed in it. Historians tend to describe that document as one of the earliest ancestors of the DOP and IGP systems we use today. (Still fuzzy on those acronyms? We wrote a whole blog about them!)

The First Written Recipe

The oldest surviving recipe belongs to Vincenzo Tanara, a Bolognese agronomist who published L’economia del cittadino in villa in 1644. He is exhaustive about the casings, precise about the quantities, and specific about the slow oven stage, but the ingredient list would raise eyebrows in any modern production facility. Alongside the pork and the diced throat fat he calls for cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, musk grains, sugar, and a good malvasia wine.

He also calls for two pounds of grated cheese per hundred pounds of mortadella. The Consorzio’s own archive of the recipe flags that line with an exclamation point and calls it a real novelty. (Hold on to that thought!).

In the U.S.A?

American bologna descends from mortadella, but the family resemblance faded generations ago, and the two products have very little to say to each other now. What kept the mortadella out of American delis, though, was not competition but instead, quarantine. It was so iconic and such a fixture of Italian American life that it got its own movie. Mario Monicelli’s 1971 comedy was released in Italy as La Mortadella and in the States as Lady Liberty, and the entire plot hangs on Sophia Loren’s character being held at JFK because customs will not let the mortadella in her arms through the door.

A Slow Day in the Oven

Mortadella Bologna earned IGP protection in 1998, and the current specification is not casual. The lean meat comes from striated pork muscle, largely shoulder, ground so fine that at least one plate has to have holes of 0.9 mm or less. The lardelli, the white cubes, are cut from prized throat fat, then heated, washed, and drained before they go into the mix. The stuffed product goes into dry-air ovens for anywhere from eight to twenty-six hours depending on its size, until the core reaches 70°C, and it comes straight out into a cold shower that drops it below 10°C. There’s no polyphosphates and coloring agents allowed, and the salt is capped at 2.8 percent.

That is potentially a full day of oven time for something that will be gone in three sandwiches.

Introducing Vantia Mortadella with Parmigiano Reggiano

Flavored mortadella is not a new idea at the deli counter. Truffle versions have been on the counter for years and move well. But what makes this one worth talking about is that it is not really a modern flourish at all.

Mortadella and Parmigiano Reggiano have been working together in Emilia-Romagna for a very long time. The official tortellini filling, registered with the Bologna Chamber of Commerce on December 7, 1974, is built from exactly six things: pork loin, prosciutto, mortadella, Parmigiano Reggiano, eggs, and nutmeg. Spuma di mortadella, the whipped Bolognese antipasto, is mortadella, cream, and Parmigiano. And, as noted above, the first recipe anyone ever bothered to write down in 1644 already had grated cheese in it. This pairing is less of an invention and more of a homecoming.

The Vantia Mortadella with Parmigiano Reggiano is a great addition to your deli program, built for the counter and for the slicer.

• Taste: Sweet, delicate pork up front with the familiar richness of the fat, then a deep savory finish from the aged Parmigiano Reggiano that lingers longer than you expect.
• Where it works: Shaved paper thin on a soft roll, folded warm over pizza with a spoonful of stracciatella, cubed onto an antipasto tray, or run through a tortellini filling.

Two Thousand Years, One Perfect Slice at a Time

Bologna spent centuries writing rules to keep this product honest, and the oldest recipe on record already had cheese in it. Vantia is not reinventing mortadella here so much as picking up a thread that Tanara left hanging in 1644 and that Bologna has kept alive ever since.