Bologna Day

What the day is

Bologna Day is observed on October 24. The subject is the smooth, mild, finely ground sausage sold in sheets for sandwiches, spelled bologna and pronounced baloney.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented.

The name comes from Bologna in northern Italy, and specifically from mortadella, the city's large, delicately spiced pork sausage studded with cubes of fat and often pistachios. American bologna descends from it and diverged sharply: the meat is emulsified to a uniform paste, the visible fat is gone, the spicing is minimal, and the pistachios are a memory. Mortadella from Bologna has protected status in the European Union, which is part of why the American product cannot use that name.

Emulsification is what defines the texture. Meat, fat and water are ground and blended until the fat is suspended in fine droplets throughout the protein, producing a paste that cooks into a uniform solid with no visible grain. The same process underlies frankfurters and several other mass-market sausages.

It became an American staple on price. Emulsified sausage uses trimmings efficiently, keeps well, requires no cooking and slices cleanly, which made it the default sandwich filling for school lunches across the twentieth century.

The word also became an insult. Baloney meaning nonsense entered American slang in the 1920s and has outlasted most of the food's cultural standing, which is a rare case of a sausage contributing more to the language than to the cuisine.

How to take part

• Fry a thick slice. Cut a couple of notches in the rim first, or it domes into a bowl in the pan.
• Buy it thick-cut from a deli counter rather than pre-packed and compare the two.
• Try real mortadella alongside it. The relationship becomes obvious and so does the distance.
• Use mustard and something sharp. The meat is mild and needs contrast.
• Check the label if sodium matters to you; processed meats run high.