zampone

Zampone is a pork sausage mixture stuffed into the boned skin of a pig's foot, then tied, cured, and sold for long simmering. The name combines Italian zampa (paw or hoof) with the augmentative suffix -one, giving big paw. Italian zampa most likely descends from a Frankish root related to Old High German stampa (something that stamps or treads), a word family that produced English stamp through a different branch. The foot named the vessel that holds it.

The origin story most Italians know is precise: in 1511, Pope Julius II besieged the town of Mirandola, north of Modena, in a campaign to reclaim papal territories. A butcher named Domenico del Cane, runs the tradition, invented zampone during the siege to make use of every part of the pigs that could no longer leave the city. The foot skin replaced the intestinal casing that the besieged town had run out of. The story may be embellished, but Julius II did take Mirandola in January 1511, and the military records confirm the siege.

Zampone and cotechino use nearly identical fillings of ground pork, fat, rind, and spices. The difference is the casing alone. The foot skin, being thicker and more gelatinous than intestine, requires longer cooking and produces a softer, more unctuous result. Modenese cooks treated them as seasonal twins: cotechino for everyday winter meals, zampone for feast days, both appearing in the same guild regulations from the 17th century.

Giuseppe Verdi was famously partial to zampone. In letters from the 1880s and 1890s, he requested deliveries from Modenese suppliers during winter months at his estate in Sant'Agata. The composer's appetite helped spread the sausage's reputation beyond the Po Valley. Zampone di Modena received Protected Geographical Indication status from the European Union in 1999, the year after cotechino, the two products bound together in law as they had long been in tradition.