Biroldo and Sopressata | The Mountains Cook With Everything

A Hungarian-Tuscan breakfast at the butcher paper

The sea gives abundance. The mountains do not. In the mountains, you take what you have, and what you have is what you have killed in October and what you have dried and what you have salted and what you have buried in clay or marble for a winter, and then in February you eat it, all of it, and you waste nothing, because there is nothing to waste with. Every food culture in every mountain range on earth follows this rule, and the foods produced under it are recognizable to one another across continents and languages. The Apuane and the Garfagnana produce two of them in particular, and I want to tell you about them, because they are the foods I now eat for breakfast more often than any other thing in this country, and because I came from a different mountain culture across Europe that produces a near-identical cousin of them, and because the convergence of the two on a piece of butcher paper in my kitchen on a Sunday morning is one of the small private pleasures of having moved to wher…