Soupy’s On

My favorite family ritual involves guts, slaughter and hangings. When my father told me that he was no longer up to the gruesome task, I decided it was my turn to keep the tradition alive.

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I reached my hands down into the box filled with cow intestines. Slowly, carefully, and with firm control over my gag reflex, I withdrew several feet of innards and began turning them inside out, inch by slimy inch. An odor of raw meat mixed with sterile hospital air wafted up to my nostrils. With a good scouring, followed by a soak in clean water, lemons and oranges, these bovine guts would be ready to play their part in a unique annual rite. When you’re in charge—as I was for the first time—you have to take the good with the bad, the finished product with the cow innards.

For the uninitiated, the process of making soppressata may seem more out of the playbook of a mad serial killer than a cookbook of southern Italian cuisine: There are slaughtered pigs, meat grinders, even hangings. Soppressata (or “soupy”) is one of a slew of cured meats that you can find in many gourmet grocery stores. Cousins with salame, prosciutto, mortadella and capicola, soupy nonetheless has a flavor, style, and—especially in Rhode Island—a distinctive tradition.

Growing up as a third-generation Italian in Westerly, I was exposed to soupy-making from an early age. My grandfather, Frank Liguori, ran a small but thriving grocery store on Pierce Street in Westerly for around forty years, selling everything in bulk bins from candy to flour to olives to pasta. (The family’s recipe for Italian ice, a guarded secret, was a huge hit at Misquamicut State Beach in the summertime.) And of course there was soupy, dry-cured and hanging from the ceilings.

A wave of immigrants from Acri in Calabria, Italy, settled in Westerly in the early twentieth century. The town sits atop the remains of a glacier, which left behind a huge natural repository of granite—stock in trade for the Italian emigres, many of whom (including several of my own ancestors) were stone masons. Interestingly, an influx of Sicilians settled in the neighboring town of Pawcatuck, Connecticut, around the same time; the two towns are separated by the Pawcatuck River, just as Sicily and Calabria are separated by the Straits of Messina. Italian traditions are still thriving in these two towns, even after 100 years of modernization.

One Calabrese tradition is making soppressata, a cured meat specific to the region, just as in America it is specific to the northeast, and primarily Westerly. The basic process has not changed since turn-of-the-century Acri, when refrigeration was an unheard-of luxury and nothing was wasted. With pigs, as the adage goes, they would use every part except the squeal. Families made soupy during the winter months, when the outside temperature would be cold enough to keep basement rooms between 45 and 55 degrees Fahrenheit, the optimal range for dry-curing. My own family still makes soupy in December or January for this exact reason.

We are hardly the only family in Westerly that prepares our own soppressata. To this day, relatives and friends will bring a soupy by our house, and the discussion will inevitably wind around statements like, “Did you use the coarse pepper or the fine?” “What’s your ratio of salt to meat?” “This is good but a little fatty…maybe too soft.” “Uncle Richard always lets it cure too long!” Every family thinks their soupy is the best. Mine is no exception.

Liguori soupy-making has none of of the trappings of modernity; the process, painstaking and exacting, is equal parts art and science. We mix the pork butts (actually shoulder meat) in old stainless steel tubs on a table put together from assorted parts by my grandfather, fill the stendines (Calabrese for “intestines”) with a hand-operated meat grinder that predates World War I—used by my grandfather and his father before him for this exact purpose—and hang the finished product in a sparse, concrete room with a jury-rigged system of dowels, wires, inverted pie plates and flypaper to keep out rodents and other curious creepy-crawlies. (Thanks to Grandpa Liguori’s ingenuity, we haven’t lost a soupy to the animali in years.) One could easily lift the entire operation out of my grandfather’s cramped basement and move it to a small farm in southern Italy, and nothing would have to change.   

As I do every year, last winter I began gearing up for production time around the Christmas holidays, anticipating that we’d convene in the basement once again sometime in January. With excited anticipation, I called my father one night from my apartment in Manhattan’s East Village: “Dad, when are we making soupy?” The note in his voice barely hid weariness.  “Oh, I don’t know if we’re going to make it this year,” he said. “Grandpa doesn’t feel up to it, and to be honest, neither do I.” My grandfather is ninety-five, troubled by weak knees and poor eyesight; his wife is ninety-three, her own vision more or less destroyed by macular degeneration. My father, still a very active man at sixty-eight, had spent most of the year caring for my mother, who battled fiercely—and successfully—against non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The rest of my immediate family was scattered throughout the country, and everyone seemed happy just to have a calm, healthy winter in front of them.