Mortadella
Based on Wikipedia: Mortadella
For thirty-three years, you couldn't legally bring mortadella into the United States. Not a single slice. The ban lasted from 1967 to 2000, prompted by an outbreak of African swine fever in Italy that had nothing to do with the sausage itself. This prohibition became so culturally embedded that it inspired an entire Hollywood comedy: the 1971 film Lady Liberty, starring Sophia Loren, built its entire plot around a woman trying to smuggle mortadella past customs.
The absurdity of banning a cooked sausage over a disease that posed no food safety risk tells you something about how beloved this Italian delicacy must be. Why else would someone make a movie about smuggling it?
What Exactly Is Mortadella?
At its heart, mortadella is a large sausage made from finely ground cured pork. But what sets it apart from its countless sausage cousins is the presence of small cubes of pure white fat—specifically, the hard fat from the neck of the pig—distributed throughout the meat like little windows of richness. The rules require at least fifteen percent of the sausage to be these fat cubes.
This isn't just aesthetic. When you slice mortadella thin and hold it up to the light, those fat pieces create a kind of stained glass effect. When you eat it, they provide bursts of silky richness against the fine-textured meat.
The sausage is flavored traditionally with whole black peppercorns, which appear as dark specks throughout. Modern versions often incorporate pistachios—their green against the pink meat and white fat creating an almost festive appearance. Some artisanal producers use myrtle berries, which connects to one theory about how the sausage got its name. Unlike many Italian cured meats that are dried or aged raw, mortadella is cooked, which gives it a gentler, more approachable flavor than its fermented relatives like salami.
A Name from Ancient Rome
The etymology of "mortadella" remains genuinely contested among food historians, which is unusual—most food names have fairly settled origins by now.
The first theory comes from Giancarlo Susini, a professor of ancient history at the University of Bologna. He points to the Latin word mortarium, meaning mortar—the bowl-shaped vessel used with a pestle for grinding. The idea is that ancient producers pounded pork in mortars to achieve that characteristic fine texture. His evidence is poetic: two funerary monuments in Bologna's Archaeological Civic Museum, believed to belong to the same ancient memorial, one depicting a herd of piglets, the other showing a mortar and pestle. Perhaps some Roman sausage-maker wanted to be remembered by his craft.
The competing theory, introduced in the seventeenth century by a scholar named Ovidio Montalbani, traces the name to a Roman sausage called farcimen myrtatum—literally "myrtle sausage." Before black pepper became available through trade routes to Asia, myrtle berries served as one of the primary spicing agents in European cuisine. A myrtle-scented sausage would have been the standard, and the name might have stuck even after pepper took over.
Both theories are plausible. Both have gaps. The debate continues.
The Geography of Italian Mortadella
If you've encountered mortadella anywhere in the world, you've almost certainly eaten mortadella Bologna, the version that holds Protected Geographical Indication status under European Union law. This designation—abbreviated as PGI—means the product must be made according to specific standards within a defined geographic area. For mortadella Bologna, that area is surprisingly large: not just the city of Bologna or even just the Emilia-Romagna region, but extending into Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, Marche, Tuscany, Lazio, and Trentino.
But beyond this famous export, Italy harbors a remarkable diversity of regional mortadellas, most of which never leave their home territories.
Consider mortadella di Campotosto, made in Abruzzo. Its local nickname is coglioni di mulo—"mule's testicles"—a reference to its distinctive shape. It holds PAT status, which stands for prodotto agroalimentare tradizionale, or "traditional agricultural food product." This is a different protection than PGI, focused on preserving traditional production methods rather than geographic origin.
In Piedmont, they make mortadella di fegato—liver mortadella—incorporating pork liver into the ground meat. It comes in two forms: cotta (cooked) and cruda (raw, cured but not heat-treated). The cooked version goes by another name, mortadella d'Orta, while the raw version is called fidighin in the local Piedmontese dialect.
Tuscany produces an unusually diverse range. Mortadella di Prato is flavored with pounded garlic and colored with alchermes, a bright red liqueur made from cochineal insects and spices. Mortadella di Camaiore, also called sbriciolona, uses fennel seeds alongside cinnamon and cloves. Each valley, each town, seems to have developed its own variation.
Perhaps the most unusual is mortadella di cavallo—horse meat mortadella—made in Albano Laziale, a town in the hills southeast of Rome. This reminds us that Italian food traditions often include meats that modern international palates find surprising.
When Mortadella Travels
The sausage has inspired imitations and adaptations around the world, though purists might hesitate to call them mortadella at all.
In English-speaking countries, you'll encounter products called "polony" in South Africa and Australia, or "devon" in other parts of Australia. These are smoother, usually lacking the fat cubes that define true mortadella. In Romania and Hungary, similar products go by "parizer" or "párizsi"—the name suggesting Parisian origins, though the connection is tenuous at best.
The most interesting transformation happened in the Soviet Union. There, a product called doktorskaya kolbasa—"doctor's sausage"—emerged in the 1930s. The name wasn't marketing whimsy; the sausage was literally designed by physicians. Soviet doctors created the recipe to help address widespread malnutrition and stomach problems, specifying a mixture of beef and pork with low fat content and high protein. Unlike mortadella, it contains eggs and milk, and is flavored with cardamom rather than pepper or myrtle. No fat cubes. No pistachios.
The name stuck because the sausage was marketed as healthy, doctor-approved nutrition. It remains popular throughout former Soviet states today, a relic of a planned economy that extended even to what went into people's sandwiches.
Mortadella Goes Halal
In countries with significant Muslim populations—Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates—pork-based mortadella obviously wouldn't work. Instead, producers make halal versions using chicken, beef, or turkey.
The Siniora brand claims the longest history in this space, established in Jerusalem in 1920. Their mortadella comes studded with sliced olives, pistachios, or peppercorns, maintaining the visual interest of the original while using permissible ingredients. The Lebanese company Al-Taghziah now exports their version globally, meaning you can find halal mortadella in specialty shops from London to Los Angeles.
Kosher mortadella follows similar principles, substituting beef for pork while maintaining the basic concept of a smooth-textured sausage with embedded fat pieces and flavorings.
How Different Cultures Eat It
In Italy, mortadella is typically sliced thin and eaten cold—on bread, in sandwiches, as part of an antipasto platter. But travel outward from Bologna and you'll find more creative applications.
The Municipal Market of São Paulo, Brazil, has made a specific mortadella sandwich famous enough to be a tourist destination. The sandwich has become so iconic that Brazilians traveling to São Paulo specifically seek it out, a regional delicacy that happens to be imported Italian charcuterie.
In Poland, they do something that would make Italian traditionalists wince: dipping mortadella slices in batter and frying them. Served with potatoes and salad, this becomes a cheaper, faster version of traditional pork cutlets. It's home cooking, weeknight dinner, not haute cuisine—but it suggests how deeply the sausage has integrated into Polish domestic life.
Vietnam offers perhaps the most fascinating adaptation. Chả lụa, sometimes called Vietnamese mortadella, accompanies bánh cuốn—delicate steamed rice rolls. The sausage shares mortadella's smooth texture but uses different seasonings and typically incorporates fish sauce. It's an example of how a concept—finely ground meat, cooked into a smooth sausage—can travel and transform while maintaining a family resemblance to its ancestors.
The American Mortadella Moment
Something unexpected happened in the 2020s: mortadella became trendy in the United States. Restaurants in New York and Los Angeles began featuring mortadella prominently on menus—not as a nostalgic Italian-American throwback, but as a rediscovered luxury ingredient.
This timing is interesting. Twenty years had passed since the import ban lifted in 2000, long enough for a new generation of chefs and diners to encounter the real thing without the baggage of prohibition. The rise of Italian food beyond the red-sauce canon—the appreciation for regional differences, for protected designation products, for ingredients with stories—created space for mortadella to be seen fresh.
Where Americans once might have dismissed it as "fancy bologna," they now understood it as something distinct: a product with Roman roots, regional variations, specific fat requirements, and a thirty-three-year ban that proved somebody cared enough to smuggle it.
Bologna's Subtle Gift
The city of Bologna has given its name to two famous sausages. One, bastardized into "baloney" in American English, became synonymous with cheap processed meat—and eventually a slang term for nonsense. The other, mortadella Bologna, retained its dignity, its fat cubes, its peppercorns.
Both products tell you something about what happens when food travels. Some traditions flatten into uniformity, optimized for mass production and unfamiliar palates. Others resist, insisting on their fat content and their geography, their funerary monuments and their myrtle berries.
The next time you see mortadella at a deli counter—that pink expanse dotted with white fat and dark pepper—you're looking at something that connects to Roman burial stones, Soviet nutritional science, São Paulo market stalls, and a Sophia Loren comedy about the absurdity of customs enforcement. All of that, sliced thin and waiting for bread.