Full Of Bologna

Yesterday, I had a bologna sandwich for lunch. Bologna (baloney) on buttered toasted white bread sounds awful to the food police, but I have loved it since I was a child. I know it is unhealthy and is basically fat. If it clogs my arteries I think my arteries will be grateful to taste that mess. Bologna originally came from Bologna, Italy. Although if you ask for bologna there, no one will know what you are talking about. What you'll end up with is mortadella, the filet mignon of bologna. Mortadella is a thick Italian pork fated meat that is flecked with bits of fat, peppercorns and sometimes pistachios. Mortadella is good too, and it shares the distinction with the politically correct food police as being evil.

Unlike Italian bologna, by law U.S. bologna has to be a meat paste, no pieces of fat can be seen. It's nice of the lawmakers to not allow us to see the fat or our conscience might m not allow us to eat it.  Bologna is a sausage, so it starts as a blend of meat (it used to be pork, but in the U.S. now it is usually more beef or chicken), fat, salt and spices, which are then stuffed into a casing and smoked. Most mortadella and bologna are seasoned with some blend of the following: black pepper, myrtle berries, nutmeg, allspice, celery seed and coriander.

And P.C. food police! Bologna is gluten free. Some people fry bologna and swear it's the best way to eat it. I never eat it that way because I like it the way I had it as a child. Hmmmmmmmmm  When I was a little boy and one year claimed that I didn't want to eat turkey my mother once let me eat bologna for Thanksgiving. Maybe mom was trying to kill me?

Italian mortadella is far superior to American bologna. It's quality meat and seasonings, whereas the American bologna is whatever scraps of mess is hanging around to grind into a paste. Still, I love the taste of that mess. Mortadella  fed the Roman army, as stone tablets contained in Bologna's Museo Civico Archeologico attest. In the Middle Ages, roughly 10,000 people, a quarter of the city's population, were involved in its production. If you make smarmy remarks about mortadella when in Italy you will be in trouble. They won't say you are "full of baloney", the popular slang meaning you are not speaking truthfully. But they may slice you into pieces of mortadella.