Soupy (and Suppressata)
The spicy sausage of Westerly, Rhode Island; its Calabrian heritage; the festival in its honor; the three pounds of it I ate yesterday
Westerly, Rhode Island, is a charming little town—population 23,000; internationally known for its summer beach villages of Watch Hill (you know, the one Taylor Swift is allegedly not getting married in) and Misquamicut.
But now it’s starting to be internationally known for something else: Soupy. That is: a cured spicy salami, an American cousin of the Calabrian classic suppressata*, a Westerly original, an immigrant heritage tradition born over 100 years ago in the garages and basements of Calabrian families that came over to Westerly to work in its granite quarries.
When I moved to Rhode Island in 2018, I did not know Westerly was a Calabrian enclave. That was a fortuitous coincidence. The majority of Calabrians here—over 1/3 of the town—are from Acri, a town about 1 hour by car from the village where my grandmother was born (Ievoli). I moved here the year I lost both my grandmother and my Aunt Con, the culinary queen and matriarch of our family. Finding a whole town that cooked with her flavors was a bit of a gift of the universe.
Three years ago, the United Theatre in Westerly launched Soupy Fest, a now-annual competition for Westerly’s (and the world’s!) best soupy. Steve Schirippa, the actor (you might recognize him as Bobby Bacchala from The Sopranos), would be hosting.
SoupyFest 2024 was an experiment, but one the United did very right—the festival sold out so fast I didn’t manage to buy any tickets. I was stewing huffily about this until the creative director wrote to me and asked me if I would be one of the judges. Everyone else was a qualified food person—a James Beard Award-winning chef or a restaurant critic for the Boston Globe or something. I, however, experienced no imposter syndrome in this crowd. There was nothing in my life I was more qualified for than tasting a whole pound of cured spicy sausage in an hour. Thank you, Aunt Con, wherever you are, for the thirty-five years of training.
This year, they invited me back to be a judge for SoupyFest III. The big event was last night—we tasted blind, judged on a 4-point rubric, and awarded the Bronze, Silver, and Gold Danglers to three of the ten local families that made the finals (not all of them Italian! you, too, can learn to make soupy!). It inspired me to write this note today, because there was a lot about it that made me want to share it.
First, I want so say how moving it is to watch a community come together over shared tradition and pride. I have found much value and inspiration this year in loving, celebrating, and investing in my community. I’ve realized these things are the best I can do for myself and my family and my friends when so much of our daily lives feels (and is) completely out of our control.
And I want to remark on how inspiring it is to watch an art/cultural institution like the United thrive in this news-making way. If you have 5 minutes, please enjoy this adorable short film, “The Missing Link,” they put together. (Cameos include two actual Westerly Packing employees.)
(I love the United Theatre. They are one of those local cultural institutions that punches way above weight. They bring so much value to our community in so many sectors: My kid and I both take music lessons in their basement music school (violin and piano, respectively). They run the fabulous Michael DePaola monthly poetry salon and open mic. I am grateful to them for hosting my Santa Chionia book launch, which was a multi-media feat featuring my friend the musician Zac Clark. Plus they have an amazing events venue where I’ve seen productions ranging from The Mountain Goats** to a Wicked sing-along. Anyway, please check them out when you stop through Westerly.)
Why I Care about Spicy Sausage
I mean, obviously, I grew up eating tons of it. But it has a fascinating 1200-year-old history in Calabria.
Back in 2015, when I was working on The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, I took a leave of absence from my job to go live in my grandmother’s village (Ievoli) in Calabria. I arrived just in time for the tail-end of the January pig slaughter. “Slaughter” might sound icky to the average grocery store sausage-buyer, but the annual slaughter a beautiful tradition: each family has been raising a single pig since the Easter previous. They take turns over the weekends in January to help one another kill and process their now-grown adult pig: it takes on average six people the whole day to do. Different villages have different set-ups and core techniques, but in Ievoli, they have a sort of stone pig altar where you take the pig. Four men restrain it while two women cut its throat and collect the blood. The pig is cleaned, gutted and hung, and then there is the butchering, a very scientific process, starting by separating the big chunks for the fussiest cures, the precious haunch for prosciutto, the neck for capicola. Then you work down through the medium cuts, the cheek and the belly, down to what can only be ground up for sausage. Every tiny bit of the pig will be used. The intestines are cleaned out and used for sausage casings—the sausage making is the last task of the day.
Then over the following weeks of February I got to experience the bounty of the pig in real time in the order you eat the meat (starting with the stuff that just can’t keep—like the cocoa blood pudding you eat the next day, then the gelatina (jelly) made of odds and ends in lard and vinegar, and the frittole, a boil of the head and feet, then the fresh sausage. Meanwhile, your cured meats are curing—you’ll parcel them out over the rest of the year as they gradually become ready for consumption. Back in my grandmother’s youth, the product of the single pig was the only meat her family would have access to all year.
That’s what I really wanted to share with you today.
A little riff about pork products, and no real call to action except that, if you’re planning on passing through Westerly on April 10, 2027, make sure you book your SoupyFest IV tickets way ahead of time (like, the moment they go on sale). Maybe I’ll see you there, if they invite me back.
Juliet
*Don’t try to correct my spelling. This is how we pronounce it.
**Have I mentioned here that John Darnielle is one of my favorite living writers? Perhaps start with Wolf in White Van if you haven’t read him yet.