It is tradition that in Linguaglossa, a small town on the slopes of Etna, the feast of San Martino is very much felt throughout the province of Catania because it is symbolically associated with the maturation of the new wine, and therefore conceived as an occasion to meet toasting by uncorking the new wine, accompanied by a substantial lunch according to the saying “s'ammazza lu porcu e si sazza lu vinu”, because many Sicilian families in this period slaughtered the pig to make salami and sausages.
The Feast of San Martino is above all the feast of grilled log sausage with a side dish of caliceddi (caulicelli).
For this preparation the sausage is placed in a spiral on a grill and is cooked on the grill for about half an hour. In the meantime the caliceddi are washed and boiled in boiling salted water, when cooked they must be drained and dressed with oil.
The sausage al ceppo belongs to remote times, to centuries-old country and peasant lifestyles, of which traces are increasingly being lost that concern, beyond Linguaglossa, also the neighboring municipalities of Piedimonte Etneo and Castiglione always in the Etna area of the province of Catania
The name derives from the fact that the meat was not minced as is the case for most salami throughout Italy, but minced on a large butchers' oak log with a large knife.
They were losing track of it but the combative mayor of Linguaglossa Salvatore Puglisi thought it best to start a project to keep this tradition alive which was disappearing for reasons of health and hygiene regulations and also of economic profitability. The winning idea was to bring the case to the attention of Slow Food to guarantee a future for Salsiccia al ceppo. His foresight has been rewarded: from today the Linguaglossa strain sausage has become part of the Slow Food Presidia, the fifty-first to be exact, of Sicily, which holds the national primacy of presidia.
“Being part of the association – comments Puglisi with satisfaction – means having the opportunity to compare ourselves with other restaurateurs, with the world market as well as giving our butchers the possibility of entering markets that weren't there before, because our traditions have need a global market to be known and valued”.
«The particularity of this sausage concerns the way in which we treat the meat – explains Anthony Russo, contact person for the three producers who have so far joined the Presidium -. We use a blade called partituri, a sort of cleaver, with which we chop five cuts of pork, the leg, the bacon, the lard, the capocollo and the shoulder, over the oak wood. Ours is an entirely artisanal work and using the stock is important because, in this way, the meat takes on a different flavor compared to what happens in industrial sausages, where the grinding takes place using machinery».
The minced meat (some butchers also use bacon) is kneaded by hand and seasoned with salt, black pepper and wild fennel seeds harvested on Etna. To this basic recipe, then, each butcher adds a personal touch, combining different doses of the individual cuts according to his own taste, inspiration and availability, and sometimes adding some other flavor, such as semi-dried tomato and seasoned provola.
«The launch of the Linguaglossa Ceppo Sausage Presidium is recognition of an entire area that has always been dedicated to the production of excellent meats – says the Slow Food coordinator of the Presidium, Riccardo Randello -. But perhaps, over the years, this tradition could have been lost without the work done by Slow Food». For some time, in fact, this specialty has been included in the Ark of Taste, the register in which for almost 25 years our association has been reporting foods at risk of extinction all over the world. The recognition as a Presidium comes at the end of a couple of years of work, stimulated and supported by the Municipality of Linguaglossa which believed in the opportunity to systematize a resource that has always been present in the area. From now on, the work to be done will be even greater: Francesco Sottile, professor of Biodiversity and quality of the agri-food system at the University of Palermo and technician of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity Onlus, explains that «the aim is to strengthen the supply chain starting from breeding. Already today the producers use exclusively meat from pigs born and raised in Sicily, but the hope is to see the birth of farms close to Linguaglossa. Realities that, of course, place animal welfare at the center of their work».
According to Filoteo degli Omodei, one of the greatest scholars of Sicily of the century. XVI who dealt with the history and geography of Sicily and Etna, the foundation of Linguaglossa dates back to the year 1100 by a colony of Genoese and Lombard adventurers who settled here to extract the resin from the pines of the Etna forest and here they built some houses in the woods giving life to a real village. The etymology of the denomination comes from Latin and Greek with a clear reference to the tongue of lava erupted in the first half of the 600s. But another thesis refers to the speech of these people of Gallic origins considered coarse.
