Tomaso Salumi
Eugenio Tomaso is a country butcher: with his family he works in the village of Faicchio, selling fresh and cured meats, especially from local pigs and Laticauda sheep, in the small Sisa supermarket. He has recently necome particularly interested in salumi, the salt-cured meats that are so popular throughout Italy, especially in the interno, where the pig constitutes a precuous natural resource. Eugenio has access to animals - in particular the maialino nero casertano - that are being raised completely freely in a large private estate nearby. 'Here the animals are, to all intents and propouse, wild,' he says, as we drive un the mountain in a Jeep to see them. A sow with a group of little piglets catches a whiff of us and runs off into a bush for cover, followed by her babies. 'They have huge expanses of woods, pastures and macchia mediterranea to roam free in, so their meat is particularly flavourful. The Casertano is a fatty breed, but it's well balanced when the pigs get a lot oh exercise and are free to eat the foods they like.' Eugenio's specialities are a fine, lean culatello - the most highly prized part of the rump - that is best when aged for two years; he also cures the spalla, shoulder, and makes a series of insaccati - sausages that have been stuffed into a natural 'sacco'. Of these, the coarse-grain salame di Napoli is dotted with large chunks of fat; finocchiona, seasoned with wild fennel seeds, is easten quite fresh. Eugenio also uses local mountain thyme, pimpinella, to flavour his lardo - the flat slabs of fat from the animal's stomach that are a delicacy sliced paper-thin onto hot toast.