Panino con Salame di Turgia

The animal in this Piedmontese salame has already lived a full working life. In the Valli di Lanzo, the steep valleys climbing north of Turin toward the Graian Alps, a turgia is a cow that has reached the end of her milking years, no longer productive and sent for slaughter. Her lean, dark, mature beef is the base of the cure, roughly seven parts to three parts added pork fat, ground and seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and garlic, sometimes wetted with a splash of the valley's red. The result tastes of where it comes from, deeper and more mineral than a pork stick, with a faint grassy note an old pasture-fed cow leaves and a pig never could.

Slicing it is a question of holding on to that meatiness. This is a lean cure, and lean cured meat shaved to translucence loses its body and reads as little more than salt and pepper; cut with some weight, the turgia keeps its chew and its dark savour stays legible in the bite. The bread answers the same way. A forceful valley salame wants a plain, sturdy, Alpine-leaning roll with a real crust, solid enough to push against rather than a soft white crumb that lets an assertive meat run away with the sandwich. Little else joins it, because the cure already carries plenty of its own character, and a sharp pickle or a loud cheese would only fight the beef rather than answer it.

The sandwich goes wrong in two opposite directions, and each one wastes the cow. Shave the turgia thin to make it look refined and a lean meat dries on the board, the slice curling and tasting only of cure, the whole reason for using an old grass-fed animal thrown away. Stack the thick slices too high and the dark mineral edge compounds into something heavy and flat, the beef turning livery at the back of the bite, so it goes on in one honest layer instead. A soft loaf is the third pitfall: it turns gummy under a fatty, forceful meat, where a crusted Alpine roll stays dry and firm and gives the beef something to be eaten through.

Unwrap one at a refuge counter up the valley and the smell is beef and pepper over a base of cured fat, with nutmeg and garlic warm beneath it rather than the sweet cured-pink note a pork stick gives off. The slice is a deep brick-red lean shot with soft white fat, cool and firm and giving a real chew before the fat loosens and coats the palate. The pepper lands in scattered warm points, the nutmeg trailing faintly behind, the beef reading mineral and almost wild against the bland crust. The roll cracks dry and then softens. The finish is long and savoury, closer to good aged beef than to a pork sausage.

To place it, set it against the rest of Piedmont's cured shelf, each a different cure on a different roll. The jar-matured salam dla duja of the Novara paddies stays soft under lard; the warm salame cotto is cooked and eaten hot; over toward Parma the mild Felino is tied by hand and shaved see-through thin. All of those are built on pork. What sets the turgia apart is the cow, a salame of these valleys that leaves the pig in a supporting role and builds the cure on the last year of a dairy animal's life.

The Spent Cow and the Valley

The name points at an animal, not a maker or a year. Turgia is the Lanzo-valley dialect for a cow at the end of her productive life, sterile or no longer milking and bound for slaughter, and over time the word came to stand for the salame her meat was turned into. The Francoprovençal speech of the valleys keeps its own form, tueurdji, the root the Italian name carries. The records name no creator and fix no founding year; the cure grew out of subsistence, the need to keep every scrap of an animal too valuable to waste, long before anyone wrote a recipe down.

What can be fixed is the geography and the economy that forced it. The valleys are high, narrow, and poor in arable ground, dairy and stock country where a cow was a household's capital and her death an event to be managed without waste. Meat too tough to eat fresh, lean and dark from years of mountain grass, was minced with pork fat and the warm spices a hill kitchen kept, salt and pepper and nutmeg and garlic, and cured to last the cold months. The valleys keep the memory alive now with the Sagra del Salame di Turgia at Devesi di Ciriè, near the mouth of the valleys, where it is eaten raw and young or cooked and aged, sliced to order over a glass of the local red.

Its formal standing arrived late and on paper. Salame di turgia was entered in the Paniere dei Prodotti Tipici della Provincia di Torino, the traditional-products register the Province of Turin launched in 2001, which ties the name to the Valli di Lanzo and to the curing of end-of-career beef with pork fat. That listing drew an administrative line around a thrift the valleys had practised for generations, a cured meat that begins, by its own definition, with a dairy cow's final season.