A slice of heaven

Then there’s the beef, which takes over from pork as you drop into Valtellina, the long Lombard valley running east towards the Swiss border. Bresaola della Valtellina PGI is made from lean beef, topside and silverside, trimmed closely, salted and air-dried in the cold, dry wind that funnels down the valley. The result is dense, deep purple-red and, traditionally eaten with rye bread and a scrape of butter. It is the leanest thing in Italy’s cured-meat repertoire, and one of the very few built on beef.

The further into the mountains we venture, the stranger (and more exciting) things get. The Valle d’Aosta, wedged into an alpine cleft between France and Switzerland, is a small region with a big food tradition. Its Lard d’Arnad PDO is pork back fat layered into chestnut-wood boxes called doils with brine and foraged herbs and aged for months. It’s traditionally served in slices on warm black bread, under a thread of honey; it’s hard to explain the magic of this combination to someone who’s never experienced it. Another local standout, Jambon de Bosses PDO, is a raw ham cured with mountain herbs and aged up to thirty months at high altitude on a bed of hay. Then there is mocetta, a dried, herb-cured beef from chamois or ibex. And there’s still more in the larder: boudin, dark with blood and beetroot, and teuteun, salted and pressed cow’s udder, which might sound like a dare, but which I assure you is utterly delicious.

East in Friuli, the Pordenone valleys give us Pitina PGI, basically a salami that had to give up being a salami. Casings were a luxury the high villages couldn’t afford, so the meat—mutton, goat or whatever game came down off the hill—was minced, cloaked in a little pork fat, rolled into balls, coated in cornmeal and smoked over the open hearth, or fogher.

Naturally, the markedly different character of these far-northern, Germanic-tinted meats requires mindful local pairings, and the cool vineyards of the north oblige. Bresaola, lean, austere and salt-dark, demands brightness, and Cantina Lavis’s Teroldego, ‘Vampata’, lends blackberry, mountain-herbs and soft tannins to the meat without overwhelming it. Speck needs something that plays nicely with the smoke, and the same winery’s Müller-Thurgau, ‘Bergwind’, brings aromatic lift to meet the juniper, with the acidity to cut the fat behind it. The Arnad lard, honey and all, meets its counterpoint in Asolo Prosecco, Dal Bello’s extra-dry ‘Osteria dei Ragazzi’. 

While it’s a charcuterie culture partly born out of necessity—keeping families fed during those long winters—it’s by no means a poor cousin to the big Parma and Emilian names found in the plains to the south. This corner of the country brings something unique, characterful and quintessentially alpine to Italy’s charcuterie board, and that’s worth celebrating.