mortadella

Mortadella is a large cooked pork sausage from Bologna, emulsified, larded with white cubes of fat, and sometimes studded with pistachios or peppercorns. The name has divided etymologists since the Renaissance: one camp traces it to Latin mortarium (mortar), because the meat was originally pounded to a paste in a stone mortar; the other traces it to myrtatum or murtatum, a Roman sausage seasoned with myrtle berries mentioned in the Edict of Diocletian in 301 CE. Both theories have ancient sources behind them.

The myrtle theory has the older paper trail. Apicius included a murtatum in his culinary collection, and myrtle berries appear in early Bolognese sausage recipes. The mortar theory gained ground in the 17th century when writers describing Bolognese pork production emphasized the pounding technique as the defining step. Both the ingredient and the method may have shaped the word's form over several centuries of oral transmission before anything was written down.

Bologna became so associated with the sausage that the city's medieval Latin name, Bononia, gave English its slang. Baloney arrived in American English around 1894 as a term for inferior sausage, then drifted into meaning nonsense by the 1920s. The city established formal guild regulations for mortadella in 1661 under the Felsina seal, one of the earliest recorded food certification systems in Europe, decades before the word crossed the Atlantic.

Mortadella fell from favor among Italian emigrants to America, who substituted cheaper blended meats and sold them under the borrowed name. The American bologna sausage that resulted is finer-ground, milder, and eaten cold in sandwiches. In 2000, Italy won European PDO status for Mortadella Bologna, codifying minimum fat-cube size, permitted spices, and the geographical boundary. The mortar and the myrtle are still arguing.