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 that climb 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 wine. The result tastes of where it comes from: deeper and more mineral than a pork salame, with a faint gamey note an old grass-fed cow leaves and a pig never could. The sandwich is a frame for that beef.

Slicing it is a question of holding on to the 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 to it, the turgia keeps its chew and its dark savour stays legible in the bite. The bread answers the same way. A strong valley salame wants a plain, sturdy, Alpine-leaning roll with a real crust, something solid enough to push against, not a soft white crumb that would let an assertive meat run away with the sandwich. Little else joins it, because the cure already carries plenty of its own forceful character, and a sharp pickle or a loud cheese would only fight the beef rather than answer it.

The sandwich goes wrong two contrary ways, 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 of nothing but cure, the whole reason for using an old grass-fed animal thrown away. Stack the thick slices too high, on the other hand, 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 rather than a pile. The roll is the third line: a soft loaf goes 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 the warmth of nutmeg and garlic under it rather than the sweet cured-pink note a pork stick gives off. The slice is dark, a deep brick-red lean shot with soft white pork 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 it, and the beef reads mineral and almost wild against the bland crust. The roll cracks dry and then softens. The finish is long and savoury, more like good aged beef than like a pork sausage, which is the whole reason a mountain household kept the old cow this way.

The Valli di Lanzo keep the salame close to home, and it carries the memory of a hard economy. A cow was a family's living, and when she stopped giving milk nothing was wasted: the meat too tough to eat fresh became salame that would keep through the winter, a thrift dish that has turned, in the way these things do, into a sought-after local delicacy. The valleys celebrate it now with the Sagra del Salame di Turgia, held at Devesi di Ciriè at the mouth of the valleys, where it is eaten raw and young or cooked and aged, sliced to order with a glass of the local red. The Francoprovençal speech of the valleys has its own word for the spent cow, tueurdji, the root the Italian name carries.

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 of the region 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 from every one of them is the cow: it is the salame of these valleys that leaves the pig in a supporting role and builds the cure on the end of a dairy animal's life.

The cow and the valley

The name is the whole story, and it names an animal, not a maker or a year. Turgia is the dialect of the Lanzo valleys for a cow at the end of her productive life, a sterile or no-longer-milking animal bound for slaughter, and over time the word came to stand for the salame her meat was turned into. The records name no creator and fix no origin year; the cure grew out of subsistence, the household need to keep every scrap of an animal too valuable to waste, long before anyone wrote a recipe.

What can be fixed is the geography and the economy that forced the recipe. The valleys are high, narrow, and poor in arable ground, dairy and stock country where a cow was capital and her death an event to be managed without waste. The meat that could not be eaten 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 pork was the binder; the cow was the point.

Its modern standing is administrative rather than ancient. Salame di turgia is entered in the Paniere dei Prodotti Tipici della Provincia di Torino, the register of traditional products the Province of Turin launched in 2001, which ties the name to the Valli di Lanzo and to the method of curing end-of-career beef with pork fat. The 2001 register did not create the salame; it drew a line around a thrift the valleys had worked for generations, a cured meat that begins, by definition, with a dairy cow's last year.