Every time the family takes a trip to Italy, we look forward to eating mortedella.  Mortedella is an Italian cold cut, pork sausage with small cubs of pork fat, that has a gentle, bologna taste.  It’s often flavored with olives and pistachios, which makes it even better.  And, if you say mortedella with verve, you can sound Italian.

The first time I showed my kids mortedella, they refused to try it because they thought a sausage with pieces of things inside was gross.  Plus growing up in America, they had grown used to this:

Bologna/baloney is the American equivalent of mortedella.  It even gets its name from the city of Bologna, which is where mortdella was invented.  And really, the two are quite similar.  The main difference between them (bologna and mortedella, that is) is that mortedella tastes good.  All the people I know who eat American bologna are under eight years old.  But in Italy, even the kids’ food tastes good to grown-ups.

My son appreciates mortedella so much that he once paid a tribute to it with a limerick.  Three cheers for mortedella!

There once was a really dumb fella
Who hated to eat mortadella
His first name was Fred
He only ate bread
While holding a purple umbrella

Categories: Poems, Random Blogs

Tags: Poems