Cured Meats Category

Longanisa is a Filipino sausage that resembles a chorizo. It's often served for breakfast in the Philippines.

This spicy Greek sausage is made with lamb, pork, and orange rind. Cook it before serving

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

This North African lamb sausage is seasoned with garlic and hot spices. It's often used in couscous dishes.

At least two kinds of sausages answer to the name mettwurst. People in Cincinnati use the name to describe a kielbasa-like sausage that's made with beef and pork, seasoned with pepper and coriander, and smoked. They like to grill it and serve it on a bun. Elsewhere, mettwurst is soft like liverwurst and ready to eat. It's usually spread on crackers and bread.

This is the Portuguese version of blood sausage.

This is Spain salty version of blood sausage, usually made with onion or rice as a filler.

This exquisite smoked pork sausage is similar to bologna, only it's flavored with garlic and has bits of fat and sometimes pistachios in it. It's a key ingredient in a muffaletta sandwich. Always serve it cold.

This German ham is cured, smoked, and dried.

This is like bologna, only with bits of stuffed olives embedded in it.

Pancetta is the Italian counterpart to our bacon. It's cured, but not smoked, and it's often used to give a subtle salty flavor to pasta sauces. Deli counters often carry cylinders of it, and slice it to order.

This is beef brisket that's been seasoned and dry-cured. It's often served hot on rye bread.

Leave it to the French to come up with this buttery rich delicacy. Goose pâté is pricier and more subtle than duck pâté, and is the best choice if you plan to serve the pâté cold. Duck pâté works best in warm dishes. Some people refuse to eat pâté de foie gras from France because the animals are force-fed to enlarge their livers.

This is a pork and beef loaf that's liberally seasoned with cracked peppercorns.

This spicy sausage is made with beef and pork. It's hard and chewy, and makes a terrific topping for pizza. You don't need to cook it before eating.

Louisiana cooks like to add this to bean dishes. It's hard to find outside of Louisiana, but it's fairly easy to make from scratch.

This is cured like a ham, but cut from the hog's shoulder. It's not as tender and lean as a true ham, and it cooks much quicker. It's a good, inexpensive choice if you want chopped ham for soups and casseroles.

This German sausage is made with beef and/or pork, onions, oat groats, and bacon. It's often served with potatoes.

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.