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08/24/1999 Archived Entry: "Chocolate Salami"

Yussie, which is short for Yussel, which is Yiddish for Joseph, called my radio program and asked if I’d ever heard of salami candy, a specialty, he said, of Jewish appetizing stores and bakeries when he grew in Newark, New Jersey. I could have sworn he said the candy was brown, like chocolate, which would indeed make it look like a salami, but the recipe he sent me is based on almond paste – with honey, and sugar, and raspberry or apricot jam -- and it doesn’t even contain cocoa to make it brown. It calls for red food coloring, though.

I’m still thinking chocolate, however, when I spy chocolate salami at the Russian grocery in Brighton Beach – M & I International on Brighton Beach Ave.. I mean this stuff was unmistakably meant to look like salami. It was dark brown, shot through with white and beige lines and spots (like the fat in a salami) and it was packed into a casing about 3 inches in diameter and nearly a foot long. Of course, I brought some. The chocolate background has a texture between cake and candy. The light spots that look like fat are from the crumbled plain cookie (petit beurre) and chopped walnuts that stud the soft chocolate base. By the way, you don’t have to buy a whole one. It’s sold by the pound. I paid $2 for a four-inch hunk. (I didn’t notice how much it weighed, but it was plenty for two people.)

Meanwhile, my associate, Iris Carulli, thought chocolate salami sounded familiar, and once we started talking about it I remembered making something years ago that was called chocolate terrine and was about the same as the salami candy I’d bought.

With just a little searching through our library, we found the following recipe in Anna Gosetti della Salda’s “Le Ricette Regionali Italiane,” which is considered the best overview of Italian regional cooking in print. (It is written in Italian and not generally available in the U.S..) It’s admittedly an Italian-flavored recipe, with both rum and Marsala, not Russian or something you would have found, as Yussie did, in an old-time Jewish appetizing store.

If any of you know more about this confection – like where else it is still sold – please drop me a line through the Feedback section of this web-site.

The Pope’s Salami
Serves 6

Anna Gosetti della Salda says this is from the Piemonte and Val d’Aosta in the far north of Italy, but I believe it is now made all over Italy, if not all over the world.

6 tablespoons unsalted butter at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg, separated
3/4 cocoa powder (I used regular Hershey’s)
1 5.3-ounce package of Leibniz or Petit Ecolier Butter Biscuits (Biscuits Petit Beurre)
1 tablespoon or so dry Marsala
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons rum

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add the egg yolk and one half the egg white. (I poured the egg white into a shot glass and eye-balled a half egg white. I don’t think it would be a tragedy if you used the whole egg white.) Mix well.

Sift the cocoa over the creamed mixture and blend it in very well.

Crush the cookies with your hands into irregular pieces not larger than 1/2-inch on a side. Add the crushed cookies to the mixture and stir until just incorporated.

Stir in the Marsala and rum.

Shape the mixture into a salami. Wrap it tightly in wax paper, tying the ends as if it were a real salami.

Refrigerate for at least 4 to 5 hours.

Cut into 1/4-inch (or thinner) slices to serve.