nduja

Nduja is the standard Italian spelling of the spicy spreadable salami from Spilinga, a small town in the Calabrian province of Vibo Valentia. The word is a phonetic adaptation of the French andouille, an offal sausage from Normandy and Brittany, introduced into Calabrian vocabulary during the French occupation of the Kingdom of Naples between 1806 and 1815 under Joseph Bonaparte and then Joachim Murat. Calabrian speakers replaced the French initial vowel with a nasal consonant cluster, a phonological move their dialect permitted and standard Italian did not. The product was simultaneously transformed: the offal filling gave way to pork jowl and shoulder packed with Calabrian peperoncino in quantities no Norman butcher would have recognized.

The chile content distinguishes nduja from every other cured pork product in Italy. Between 30 and 50 percent of nduja by weight is Calabrian peperoncino, ground into a paste with the pork fat. The result is a bright red, spreadable sausage with a heat level that marks it as a condiment rather than a protein source. The spread was practical for poor rural households: a tablespoon stirred into tomatoes made a pasta sauce, and a smear on bread served as a full meal. Calabrian farmworkers carried small packets of nduja as field food well into the 20th century.

Nduja is packed into natural casings and cured by smoke and air, which preserves it without refrigeration and concentrates the flavor further. The casings come in several formats: the smallest, morsello, is finger-sized; the largest, torcolo, is a ring-shaped coil. During the Spilinga festival of San Pantaleone, held every July, nduja is grilled in its casing and eaten directly from the fire. The festival has been held annually since at least the 1950s, though the sausage itself is two centuries older.

Nduja was added to Italy's Prodotti Agroalimentari Tradizionali list by the Ministry of Agriculture in 2006, formalizing its regional identity in Italian law. By 2015 it had entered British and American supermarkets. The word appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary's online edition in 2016, defined simply as a type of spicy Italian pork sausage. The OED's decision to include nduja, with its unusual nd- opening, settled the English spelling question for good.