jamón

The Spanish jamón comes from Old French jambon, meaning ham, which derived from jambe, meaning leg. The French jambe traces back to Late Latin gamba, meaning hoof or leg of an animal. That Latin term arrived from the Greek kampē, a word for a joint or bend, the angle a limb makes at the knee. The root that names an Italian shrimp (gambero), a French ham (jambon), and the Spanish jamón all share this image of a bent limb.

The Iberian Peninsula had its own tradition of salting and air-curing pork legs long before the French word arrived. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, praised the cured hams of Pompelo (modern Pamplona) and the Cantabrian coast as superior to anything produced in Rome. These cured legs existed without the word jamón for centuries; Latin called a cured leg perna and a shoulder petaso. The French-derived jamón replaced these Latin terms in Castilian during the medieval period, in the long exchange of words and techniques across the Pyrenees.

Jamón ibérico, made from the black Iberian pig and cured for up to four years in mountain air, is now among the most expensive food products in the world. The Iberian pig feeds on acorns in the dehesa, the open woodland of Extremadura and Andalusia, and the fat of acorn-fed pigs resists oxidation and stays fluid at room temperature. A denomination of origin system introduced in 1986 divided jamón into four grades, from mass-produced jamón serrano to hand-selected bellota 100% ibérico. The word now carries both a legal and a sensory meaning.

Jamón appears in Spanish literature as early as the thirteenth century, in the Libro de Alexandre, a Castilian epic. By the Golden Age, a leg of jamón hanging from a kitchen rafter was a standard image of domestic comfort in plays and novels. Cervantes mentions it as something ordinary. What was ordinary in 1600 is now luxury food, and the same four-letter word labels both a supermarket product and a cured leg that spent four years in the air of the Sierra de Aracena.