Before you even realise it, a conversation about salami in Italy takes you on a journey the length and breadth of the entire country. There's salami from Milan, Cremona, Piacenza, Piedmont, Felino (a town in the Parma province famous for its salami), Tuscany, Naples and Calabria, sometimes called sausage or soppressa, and we could go on and on.

The jewel in the country's crown, it is generally made with pork and this is the fun part: Historically, farmers mincing the meat, expertly mixing up lean and fatty parts with salt then made up their own recipes adding all the very best that the land had to offer. This is why, in Italy, every salami is different. Some contain pepper, salt and little else (designed to give full expression to the pork itself) and those which surprise us with a touch of garlic, spicy chilli, wine or fennel seeds or other with a touch of wild boar, goose, beef or venison.

Our salami is an ode to simplicity because in Emilia we are convinced that when the ingredients are good all that is required is just a pinch of something else: pure pork meat, salt, flavours and a few selected spices. The meat is minced, seasoned and stuffed into elongated intestine sacs. It is then left to age for around 70-80 days in damp, temperature-controlled rooms where all its flavours come out.

The perfect matching? Its top quality ingredients mean that it is best tasted simply with two slices of bread or with other local cured meats (it always features on mixed cold cut platters in taver) or with a few Parmigiano Reggiano shards.