Cured Meats Category

This is a Swedish pork sausage. Cook it before serving.

Prosciutto hails from Italy and is reknown for its delicate, salty flavor. It's usually cut into paper thin slices and served raw. Especially well regarded is Parma ham, which comes from Parma in Italy. Select a prosciutto that's shiny and deeply colored.

A German specialty, this is smoked beef that's normally sliced thin.

This pork and beef sausage looks and tastes like bologna. Germans like to heat it up and serve it with potato salad or bread.

This is a family of ready-to-eat sausages that are made with beef and/or pork and heavily seasoned with garlic and spices. They're often used in sandwiches or antipasto plates. Many salami, like the popular Genoa salami, are air-dried and somewhat hard. Others, like cotto salami, are cooked, which makes them softer and more perishable. Most salami are made of pork, but all-beef kosher salami are also available. In Italian, salame is the singular form and salami the plural, but Americans often talk of one salami and many salamis.

This is a Portuguese pork sausage that's often served with rice and beans in Brazil.

This is a salt-cured chunk of fat that comes from pork bellies. It's used in much the same way as bacon, though salt pork is fattier and not smoked.

A typical sausage consists of ground meat that's combined with fat, flavorings, and preservatives, and then stuffed into a casing and twisted at intervals to make links. Pork is most commonly used, but butchers also use beef, lamb, veal, turkey, chicken, or game, and some also use fillers like oatmeal and rice to stretch the meat a bit. Casings vary too--in addition to intestines or artificial casings, butchers sometimes use stomachs, feet, skins, or they do away with casings altogether and sell the sausage in bulk. After assembling a sausage, a butcher can either sell it as fresh sausage, or else cure, dry, or precook it in some way.

A German specialty, schinkenspeck is lean pork that's been dry-cured and aged. It's normally sliced paper-thin and served cold.

This German cold cut consists of ham suspended in a bologna-like emulsion. It's usually served cold on sandwiches.

A Pennsylvania Dutch specialty, this is a mixture of sausage and cornmeal. It's often slowly fried and served with eggs and grits.

This Spanish dry-cured ham doesn't need to be cooked before eating. It's not smoked, and it's usually cut into very thin slices.

Sliced ham is moister than other kinds of ham, which makes it far more perishable. Store it in the refrigerator and use it within a few of days after buying it.

This is a smoked variation of German bratwurst.

These are sometimes thrown into Southern stews to lend a smoky flavor.

The jowl (which is pronounced "jole" in the South) is the hog's cheek. It's often cut into pieces and used to flavor stews, collard greens, and bean dishes.

These are great for flavoring stews and soups.

These are often used to flavor bean dishes.

Sobrasada is a raw Spanish pork sausage. It's similar to Spanish chorizo, only heavier on the paprika and garlic.

This is a fatty Italian pork salami that's seasoned with peppercorns.

This is a spicy Lebanese beef sausage. Look for it in Middle Eastern markets.

This is made from a mixture of calves' feet or pig snouts, eggs, and other meats that's been cooked and then allowed to gel. There's no need to cook it further; the cold slices are usually served as appetizers.

This is a family of spicy, somewhat dry pork and/or beef sausages that are great for sandwiches. They don't need to be cooked. Varieties include landjaeger and thuringer.

This is a heavily smoked ham with a spicy, peppery rind. It's often used in Cajun dishes.

Germans like to spread this smoky "tea sausage" on crackers or bread at teatime.

These have chunks of meat suspended in them that form a mosaic pattern when sliced. Varieties include schinkenwurst, jagdwurst, tyroler, Ansbacher pressack, tongue sausage, and zungenwurst.

This is a mild summer sausage that's made of pork and sometimes beef.

Tocino is Spanish for bacon, but in the Philippines, it refers to cured pork that's been marinated in a sweet red sauce. Look for it in Asian markets.

Delis often stock loaves of pork, lamb, veal, or beef tongues that have been cooked, pressed, jellied, and/or smoked.

This exquisite French sausage is usually made with pork, smoked bacon, wine, and garlic. It's a great sausage for a cassoulet. Cook it before serving.

This is a pork and beef soft salami ring.

Different brands of turkey bacon have wildly different amounts of fat, but most have much less fat than ordinary bacon. The flavor suffers a bit, though.

Many meat analogs are disappointing, but some variations on vegetarian bacon are surprisingly tasty. See the recipes for Vegan Bacon, Tempeh Bacon, or Tofu Bacon posted on www.vegweb.com.

These small, squat hot dogs come in cans. They're often used to make hors d'oeuvres.

These are mildly seasoned German veal sausages, very light in color. Germans like to eat them with potato salad during Oktoberfest. Cook before eating.

This choice German ham is smoked over beechwood and juniper and has a salty, smoky flavor. It's usually cut into very thin slices and eaten raw.

This is liverwurst dotted with pistachios.

This is a lightly smoked, dry-cured British ham. It's saltier but milder in flavor than other European dry-cured hams.

This German blood sausage includes pieces of pickled tongue. It comes ready to eat, but it's often heated before serving.