The Craft Meat Revolution?

A gift box and some interesting observations

For my birthday, my parents bought some craft charcuterie online for us, from a place called Smoking Goose in Indianapolis. If you think Indianapolis seems like a somewhat unlikely place to get handcrafted salami and other high-end deli meats, well, so did I.

The “craft” phenomenon began with beer, and over the years has extended to many other things: pickles, cocktail mixes, even soda. And so it also extends to charcuterie, with an increasing number of American producers making these Old World classics.

There really is a “craft revolution” going on. In some ways, this is a very modern phenomenon, but in other ways it harkens back to a much older economy: local and regional networks of commerce in which small farms and relatively small settlements supported each other, as opposed to today’s highly centralized economy. (I’ve touched on this idea before. Here, for example, writing about the restaurant scene in the small Shenandoah Valley city of Staunton, Virginia; and here, on the fact that small towns were once full local economies.)

So I was excited to try the craft salami, and was interested that it came out of a small producer in Indiana. Sometimes stuff like this is too experimental or plain old complicated (craft beer has this issue too), or it’s just not quite there yet (there’s a heck of a lot of deeply embodied knowledge in a craft like this). In some cases, a good mass-produced product is still better, even though it might not be quite as interesting.

The verdict? Most of it was tasty, but it was a bit odd; sort of like you had to eat it slowly and figure out if you liked it. Trying too hard? Fancy product names with flavors that don’t quite deliver? A process that still had some kinks? All of those things, maybe.

The elk, pork, and berry salami sounded interesting, and tasted good, but months later, I don’t remember the flavor. In fact, I don’t remember much of any of it. I remember thinking, “If these guys keep at it a few more years, they might get really good.” I was glad I hadn’t paid for it myself. But I’m glad there are early adopters, as it were, who support these enterprises.

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There’s this notion that charcuterie is snobbish—for example, the infamous David Brooks “sandwich” essay in which a working-class individual was supposedly mystified by the fancy names on an upscale sandwich shop menu. Lots of wineries and upscale restaurants offer charcuterie and cheese boards as appetizers or small plates. Charcuterie, like wine, has an element of terroir to it—the air is part of the curing process—and it’s a perfect product for small-batch “craft” producers. Localism. “Authenticity.” Handmade. Etc.

However, my perspective, as an Italian American, is interesting. I call charcuterie “cold cuts,” and while the best stuff might be reserved for Christmas or Easter antipasto, there’s nothing snobbish or fancy about it. It wasn’t everyday eating exactly, but in every deli in every Italian-American neighborhood 100 years ago, you would have found dry sausages and sopressatas hanging from every ceiling, and salami and mortadella behind every counter, just as you still do today. These products are not cheap, but they’re not exotic treats. And when you can get the unselfconscious and (relatively) affordable version at an old-school deli, the new, expensive “craft” stuff has to be damn good.

I think it’s likely that most craft charcuterie producers in the United States are appealing not to Italian Americans, who know the product category well, but rather to other Americans for whom it’s a little bit more unusual. This also gives these newer producers more room to experiment, and to fall short. I had that thought with the Smoking Goose products—who puts all this different stuff in salami? Who calls a salami “Delaware fireball”?

I suppose if you’re not bound by tradition, you feel more free to innovate. And if your customers don’t have a clear idea of what your product is “supposed to” be, you have more leeway with them too. Perhaps my own idea of what they’re supposed to be makes it harder for me to appreciate new twists.

As far as I can tell, domestically produced craft charcuterie only really appeared in the United States in the 2000s. And most of it is not made by Italian-American families. One of the first was La Quercia, founded in 2005 out of Iowa. It was started by a couple named Herb and Kathy Eckhouse, who lived in Parma, Italy and tried to bring back that craft with them and make high-quality American prosciutto (and they did; I’ve had it, and it’s excellent.) They then “then applied what we learned to other cuts of pork.” Learning by doing.

Smoking Goose isn’t Italian either. A profile recounts, “Smoking Goose founder Chris Eley admits that there’s no old-world connection for his products, and that he doesn’t come from some generations-long lineage of European butchers.” Eley opened a butcher shop in 2007, and founded Smoking Goose in 2011. His products appear in restaurants (local businesses supporting other local business) as well as the company’s online store.

There’s also Olympia Provisions, opened in Oregon in 2009 by a Greek-American family. It was a cooking stint in Switzerland, however, as well some cultural heritage, that led to the American charcuterie company. The company’s about page has a great bit on the art of charcuterie:

Making charcuterie is not cooking: you're producing something, repeating the same motion in the same way with the same ingredients in hopes of perfectly rendering the same product over and over and over. Thousands per day. I have to ensure that millions of pounds are perfectly identical and that we utilize the entire animal (thus the launch of our Dog Treats). Over the course of the year we make one, maybe two new products. And they have to be amazing. What keeps me going in the day-to-day is the fact that I am always getting better, finding small efficiencies that make the process easier and the product better. I'm not a master, and I never will be. It's the pursuit of it that I love: making a glorious thing with base elements of pork, fine sea salt and technique. I hope you enjoy these products as much as I enjoy the opportunity to continually improve upon them.

One more newer American company of which I’m aware, Olli, started in Virginia in 2010, and is run by an Italian American with a family history in charcuterie.

There are at least two Old World-style American companies in the business too: Volpi in St. Louis, and Molinari in San Francisco, both founded by Italian immigrants over a century ago.

Most of the American craft charcuterie I’ve tried is just missing something. It’s a bit like driving a Hyundai in the year 2000, or buying Chinese electronics today. You can feel the effort and the workmanship, but it just falls a little short.

But Volpi salami—you can buy it in World Market or Trader Joe’s—is uncommonly good for a mass-produced product. It tastes Italian. That isn’t just the taste of pork, salt, and spices, which is all charcuterie really is. It’s the taste of 100 years of accumulated knowledge, and hundreds of years before that. It’s the taste of so many bits and pieces of tacit knowledge that you could never explain, let alone write down. Why is pork and salt so hard to get just right? Think of it this way: the “recipe” to paint the Mona Lisa is no good without a Da Vinci to actually paint it.

When people remember an old neighborhood joint with, say, the best pizza I’ve ever had or pancakes like you can’t get anywhere or frozen custard like nobody makes these days—all memories I have come across—they’re probably just being nostalgic. But I’ve always wondered: what if it really was the best pizza ever made? What if the old pancake house was implementing a lost family recipe that really delivered perfect pancakes?

It’s a bit like thinking about the pyramids, and how we don’t really know how they were built. How many perfect recipes, with the embodied knowledge to perfectly execute them, have simply been irrevocably lost? How much effort and trial and error goes into finally producing a salami that’s sort of just as good as the ones that were effortlessly made centuries ago?

But while that work might feel useless—reinventing the salami stick—it’s really the work of carrying on civilization. Of staying curious, of seeing the value in tradition, and putting in the effort to see if it can be improved. Craft charcuterie in America in 2022 isn’t some snobbish trend. It’s a deeply human endeavor and—even if they need a few more years—a delicious one too.

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Related Reading:

The Glory of Tomato Paste

Why Not Put the Meat *In* the Bread?

Plant-Based Patties, Italian Peasant Style

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