Teteun

Teteun, patois valdôtain for 'udder' and kin to French tétine, is salted cow's udder, pressed and cooked like a cured ham. It descends both from the Roman sumen (Apicius's De re coquinaria records sow's udder blanched then grilled) and from the peasant duty to waste nothing of the slaughtered beast; but where Rome used the pig, cattle-rich Valle d'Aosta uses the udder of its native Pezzata Rossa cows. The fresh udders are drained of milk, layered in vats with salt, sage, bay, rosemary and juniper berries for about a fortnight, then cooked in a bain-marie and pressed in moulds like cooked ham, keeping over a year without preservatives. Sliced thin, it is served warm or cold as an antipasto, dressed with a green parsley-oil-garlic sauce and eaten with fig or raspberry jam or syruped 'martin sec' pears, and is also used to stuff ravioli. Production revived around Gignod, near Aosta, from the 1970s; the town holds its Fëta di teteun festival in the second half of every August, and teteun is a listed Traditional Agri-food Product (PAT).

Sliced paper-thin, it is dense and tender at once, mild and clean-tasting rather than gamey, with the herbs and juniper perfuming a faint sweetness of milk fat. Warm, it softens and turns almost buttery; the sharp green garlic sauce and a dab of fruit jam play savoury against sweet.

Cow's udder is glandular and fatty tissue laced with connective collagen. The fortnight in salt works by osmosis: salt draws water out of the tissue and penetrates it, lowering the water activity below what most spoilage bacteria tolerate, while the terpene compounds in juniper, rosemary, sage and bay add aroma and mild antimicrobial action. Gentle cooking in a bain-marie, held well below a boil, denatures the muscle and gland proteins and slowly converts collagen to gelatin without toughening the meat or melting out the fat. Pressed in a mould and cooled, the released gelatin sets and binds the mass into a firm, sliceable block, much like cooked ham, and the combination of salt cure and low water activity lets it keep for over a year.