> honest I always thought mortadella was overrated
> I'm more of a salame kind of guy.
two times wrong:
- mortadella is delicious, if you don't like it, fine, you're the rounding error, but nobody is over selling it, people just love it because what's not to love about it?
- salame is not an alternative to mortadella, it's a completely different product (mortadella is cooked, salame is air-dried), in the same way a steak is not an alternative to bresaola (same animal, different process).
Go to a sandwich shop that has them both, and you'll probably find two sandwiches on the menu that are identical up to substituting salami and mortadella.
I would be very surprised to find a menu anywhere, except for maybe in some high modernist bullshit cuisine, that substitutes ice cream and broccoli.
That's because what is sold in America as bologna is mostly an American product and not actually descended from Italy. Like many things in the US, it was produced and sold by and for immigrants.
specifically, traditionally mortadella from Bologna is without pistaches, I prefer the variant we have in central Italy (the one from Rome), that always contains them.
Original mortadella was born in Latium, Bologna made it popular.
Some have olives as well, I tried it myself years ago. Mortadella is delicious though in the US there are two versions for sale. I forgot which, is the one that is a bit too dry and not to my taste. In my 40s now I stay away from processed meats as much as I can.
I see this marketed all the time as olive loaf here in Appalachia. There's a lot of Italian influence here in the coal fields, but most of the Italian product names have died off.
I remember watching a youtube video on Doctor Sausage. Next time I meet an older/elderly Eastern European who lived in the Soviet Union I should ask them how they remember it.
EDIT: here it is, this is the video I saw, includes one interview with a babushka:
