If salami is the blog of cured meats, then prosciutto is the great novel. A salami requires anywhere from 20 to 120 days to cure, making it popular with chefs who want to put their house-made stamp on a rustic appetizer. But the best prosciutto requires 8 to 24 months to transform the salt-covered hind leg of a pig into a $35-per-pound luxury, a rosy meat that, when thinly sliced, is a complex, faintly salty delicacy that dissolves into richness on the tongue. It is nothing short of a miracle.

“It’s a leap of faith,” Paul Bertolli, the expert behind Fra’ Mani salumi, acknowledged with a laugh. Known for his artisanal cured meats, he has yet to make the leap to prosciutto. Space, time and, as he put it, “all that money hanging up in the air” are daunting barriers.

Prosciutto has been made on the Italian peninsula since the time of Caesar. Traditionally the legs are hung after the November slaughter and left to mature throughout the seasons. Careful attention is paid not only to the breed and weight of the pig but also to the way the leg is boned and trimmed, the type and amount of salt applied and the aging, cleaning and sealing processes, all of which must be undertaken at just the right time, under favorable temperatures and humidity. It takes skill to ensure the meat doesn’t rot; texture and flavor require artistry. Today in Parma, Italy, there are schools and trade groups dedicated to the science of the ham. Knowledge aside, you still have to wait an awfully long time before you can taste if what you’ve made is any good.

Photo

Nine years ago, Herb Eckhouse, then a 50-year-old Des Moines seed-company executive who’d been based in Parma, got a glimmer of what he’d like to do with his early retirement. He was eating prosciutto in Parma with a friend who said, “You know, if you make something this good, you’re going to make a lot of people happy.” A ham-shaped light bulb went off, Eckhouse recalled.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

For years, he imagined making good food in Iowa. “It was clear that we had this incredible bounty around us, but we weren’t known for creating great stuff to eat,” he told me, stretching his rangy frame at his dining room table. (Clearly things have changed: his wife, Kathy, was serving us apple pie whose heartbreaking crust was made with lard rendered from acorn-fed organic Berkshire pigs, their latest project.) “At the beginning of the 20th century, Iowa fed people. And here we are in the 21st century, and we’re feeding machines. It’s just a priori wrong.” He continued: “People were saying, ‘Iowa’s dying, and there’s no value added here.’ At that point I was thinking, Gosh, I wonder if we can make prosciutto in Iowa.”