How America Fell in Love With Charcuterie

In the Catalonian town of Girona, a large metal door swung open to reveal thousands of ham legs, hanging from the rafters like baseball bats. The cool air carried the funk of aging meat: jamón serrano, Spain’s iconic salt-cured hams.

Traditionally, Spanish cured hams were hung in curing sheds, explained Álvaro Díaz de Liaño López, the marketing director at the Consorcio del Jamón Serrano. As cold, moist winters gave way to hot, dry summers, they’d lose over a third of their weight, and their fat would slowly release into the flesh, creating concentrated flavors and an unctuous texture. Modern facilities mimic the seasons with climate-controlled rooms, with equally spectacular results. In the next chamber I entered – the “summer” room — the air was warmer, and the ham legs glistened like glazed doughnuts in the dry heat.

Many of these hams would end up in the United States, packaged for brands like Costa Brava Mediterranean Foods and Noel Alimentaria for grocery stores like Wegmans and Costco. The latter had gotten me interested in jamón serrano in the first place. If you search “Costco ham” on TikTok, videos with millions of views show people unboxing the 14-pound ham from Noel Alimentaria, assembling the traditional ham stand, and carving paper-thin slices for holiday parties and charcuterie boards — all for the relatively low price of $99.99.

Thirty years ago, jamón serrano couldn’t even be found in the U.S. How did this happen? I wondered. How did European-style charcuterie become a holiday flex available to anyone with a Costco Gold Star membership?

When America discovered charcuterie

Charcuterie comes from the French phrase chair cuit, which means cooked meat. But in cuisines around the world, the term encompasses all kinds of preserved proteins, including dry-cured hams and sausages that aren’t cooked. For thousands of years, before refrigeration, curing meat was the only way to preserve it. 

“Humans didn’t create this culinary marvel for our own pleasure. We did it for our survival,” says Michael Ruhlman, co-author, with chef and culinary instructor Brian Polcyn, of the 2005 cookbook Charcuterie. The book, a manual for making everything from French pâtés to Italian salumi, helped put charcuterie on the map in the U.S. But it was a tough sell when they started writing it, Ruhlman recalls. 

“In a culture that’s fat-phobic and salt-phobic and is devoted to recipes that take 30 minutes or less, we wanted to write a cookbook that was devoted to salt and devoted to fat. Some of the recipes took all day, some of them took days, and for some of them, if you didn’t do them right they could kill you. How’s that for a cookbook proposal?”

But the book’s release coincided with the growing farm-to-table movement in the United States, and gained traction with chefs who were embracing tradition and a DIY ethos. Polcyn jokes that for a while, Charcuterie was the “most stolen cookbook in America,” as chefs around the country studied its recipes. 

How jamón crossed the Atlantic

Soon after Charcuterie’s release, chefs around the country began applying Old World techniques to domestic products such as U.S.-raised Berkshire pork. From 2006 to 2009, several producers emerged on the West Coast, such as Boccalone (now closed) in San Francisco and Fra’ Mani in Berkeley, California, and Olympia Provisions in Portland, Oregon. Chef Chad Colby started a dry curing program at Chi Spacca, the Los Angeles restaurant of 1999 F&W Best New Chef Nancy Silverton.

Around the same time, barriers to importing charcuterie into the U.S. started to come down. In 2007, chef José Andrés, with the Spanish producer Fermín and fine-foods importer Rogers Collection, became the first to import jamón ibérico, the prized Spanish ham from Iberian pigs, into the U.S. Six years later, the USDA significantly eased restrictions on the imports of Italian cured meats.

But according to Polcyn and Ruhlman, some of the best charcuterie you can buy has been available in the U.S. for over a century.

The artisans who kept tradition alive

Since 1925, when second-generation Italian American, Ugo Buzzio, opened his charcuterie shop in Manhattan, Salumeria Biellese has quietly supplied charcuterie to some of the best chefs in New York City. Its evolution helps tell the story of how Italian products came to dominate the American charcuterie board.

Buzzio’s parents came from the Biella province of Italy, near the border with Switzerland, where he learned the craft of charcuterie during summers. For a time, his Manhattan charcuterie shop mostly catered to French restaurants in the city like La Caravelle, making specialties like saucisson à l’ail (a garlic sausage) and fromage de tête (headcheese).

In the early ’80s, as Ugo’s son, Marc, was taking over, high-end Italian restaurants started to emerge, and demand shifted toward Italian products. “People became aware that there was more than red sauce and chicken Parm,” says the younger Buzzio, now in his 70s. At the same time, the ethos of the Slow Food movement, which began in Rome in 1986 when the opening of a McDonald’s sparked protest from chefs, found its way to the U.S. From there, chef requests evolved, says Buzzio. He first made finocchionna — an Italian fennel sausage from Tuscany — for legendary chef Sirio Maccioni at Le Cirque in 1998.

Today, in addition to chef orders, Buzzio makes over 100 recipes passed down from his father at a warehouse in Hackensack, New Jersey, and a plant in St. Louis. On a summer day, he gave me a tour of the New Jersey facility, where various meats were at different stages of production. Skin-on pork jowls destined for guanciale sat under a layer of salt. Slabs of seasoned pork belly and mahogany links of Black Angus beef swayed from the rafters, ready to be turned into pancetta and bresaola.

Old-world craft vs. modern rules

While many salumi makers have digitized production, Buzzio still relies on old-school processes. “My computer is my nose. My eyes, my ears, my fingertips,” he said, pointing to the bloom of mold at the bottom of a sausage link, a sign of proper aging. 

Buzzio is best known for his salami, which is made by grinding meat and fat, then fermenting it in a natural casing and allowing it to air-dry. Unlike most modern producers, he does not rely on a starter culture, instead allowing yeasts in the air to ferment the salami naturally, just like they were made in the Old World, imparting them with terroir.

Doing things the traditional way comes at a cost. In 2003, Buzzio spent more than $100,000 on a validation study to prove that pathogens were killed during the natural curing process, despite not using a “kill” step like cooking the meat. Most producers can’t afford such research. “When I started, there must have been about 10 different salami makers in the New York City area,” says Buzzio. “By 1993, they were almost all gone because of USDA regulations.” 

Salami is made in the “danger zone,” between 40 degrees and 140 degrees, but fermenting it naturally or with a starter culture lowers the pH, inhibiting the growth of harmful bacteria, says Polcyn. “That’s the magic of salami.” Following the release of Charcuterie, Polcyn led seminars with health department officials to demonstrate how cured meat is safe to sell when it’s properly made. Since then, salumerias like Olympia Provisions and Il Porcellino in Denver have worked with the USDA to receive certification.

From viral boards to lasting legacy

These days, charcuterie might face a more existential threat. Search “charcuterie board” on TikTok, and, in addition to cured meat and cheese, you’ll find boards artfully topped with candy, smeared butter, or even deconstructed McDonald’s orders — so much for Slow Food. 

Still, if the ham legs taking over my feed are any indication, people are hungrier than ever for the real thing — food that takes time and skill to create. 

I thought of this as Buzzio handed me a slice of mortadella, studded with pistachios. It was silky and sweet with a hint of cinnamon, worlds away from the flabby packaged bologna I remembered from childhood sandwiches. “I’ll put that up against anybody,” he said.

It was hard to disagree.