From what I can tell, soppressata is meat and lard in an intestinal casing—like salami, but bigger and fattier—and each region has its own version. Dario's is a soppressata medicea, a sixteenth-century preparation, with the cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, orange zest, and sweet wine that would have featured in a Renaissance kitchen. (For Dario, Italian cooking peaked in 1533: why fix something that was never broken?)

I weighed the pig bits: two hundred pounds of knuckles, heads, feet, toenails, tits, tongues, plus some misshapen parts I couldn't identify. The Renaissance ingredients were added, and it was all boiled slowly until it became a gray sludge. The pot was then allowed to cool - but only a little. A pig's bony bits are full of gelatine and solidify like concrete if they reach room temperature.