Hurleyville’s quaint main drag has undergone a quiet renaissance in recent years. Backed by the benevolent benefactor The Center for Discovery, with its altruistic mission and seemingly bottomless funding, the shabby, run-down buildings of my childhood town have been renovated, restored, and rented out through their Healthy Community Model. The Pickled Owl serves up craft beer and farm-to-table fare. The Hurleyville General Store offers artisanal products for the kitchen, body, and home. A rail trail bisecting Main Street offers a convenient and scenic thoroughfare for strollers and stroller-pushers, joggers, cyclists, dog-walkers, and families.
It’s not all different. Frankie and Johnnie’s pizzeria is still there, at least in spirit—and signage (in October, the business went on the market). And the Mobil is a forever fixture, though now it stands in the shadow of the lofty Hurleyville Arts Centre, which houses a cinema, live performance venue and ballroom event space, fitness studios, and an art gallery.
But the newest kid on the block is La Salumina, an artisanal charcuterie company and food market. The Italian-style salumeria opened last April amid the first wave of the pandemic.
Ethical Charcuterie
In the summer of 2010, Eleanor Friedman packed up and headed off to a farm in rural Tuscany. Having recently renounced vegetarianism, she set out to reconcile herself to the reality of meat-eating. “I was on this quest to know all of the processes along the food chain—to have some ownership over what I was eating,” she says. For three months, Friedman worked as a farmhand, tending, feeding, herding, and helping slaughter the pigs, occasionally pitching in with the salumi production, before returning tanned and transformed to the New York City service industry.
But the small taste she had gotten of Tuscan charcuterie techniques was not enough. “I realized I really wanted to pursue this,” she says. Sustainable and ethical practices were core to her ethos from the start. “It turned into: If people are going to choose to eat meat, then let's make these products available from meat that we can stand behind.” And in 2013, she returned to the farm, this time to intern with the salumieres.
At that point, Friedman says she had no attachment to opening her own place; she was happy to learn the craft and work for someone else. But as it turns out, Diane Lane was not the only one to fall in love under the Tuscan sun. One evening at a bar in Siena during her second farm apprenticeship, Friedman was introduced to Gianpiero Pepe—a friend of a friend, who was working as a chef. The rest, as they say, is storia.
After six years in New York City, working both front and back-of-house in restaurants, hosting supper clubs, and catering small events, in late 2019, the couple moved upstate with the goal of opening a small Italian salumeria, using Tuscan techniques and local pasture-raised pigs.
Cart Before the Horse
Because many of these products take months and even years to cure and age, the plan was always to get a jumpstart on production before opening the retail store to the public. “This is the way Italian small producers do it,” Pepe says. “You make your product and then you sell it in your front shop.” But when COVID hit, USDA inspectors were a hard commodity to come by and the rent had to be paid anyway, so the plan was turned on its head.
They opened in April 2020 as a small market, stocking a curated selection of local goods and imported Italian sundries, plus raw and cooked meat products like sausages, which helped them squeak by until they were able to get the first phase of their USDA certification in early February. This preliminary approval means they have the greenlight to make fresh, cooked, and some cured products like salami.
“We're very Tuscan-focused,” Friedman says of their salumi selection. “We don't want to be doing the American version of Italian, which is grabbing random stuff from all over the country, because the food in Italy is so regional. But we do have a couple of products that fall sort of outside of the confines of Tuscany, because we work with a whole animal and we don't find that the American public will eat the Tuscan product made with that part of the animal.” For example, a pate rustico, familiar and pleasing to the American palate, replaces Tuscan fegatelli, a grilled liver dish.
Other Salumina products include rillettes, a pork confit that is delicious slathered on a cracker or a piece of focaccia; coppa di testa, a headcheese made with garlic, lemon and spices; and ton-no, braised pork, preserved in olive oil with black pepper, bay leaves, and cinnamon leaves—a play off of tuna, in both word and texture.
The pastured whole pigs used in all the products are sourced locally from Kinderhook Farm, Climbing Tree Farm, and Gibson Family Farms. Pepe and Friedman do all the butchering in the back of the shop, as well as the curing, cooking, and aging. In Italy, there is a word for the artisanal craft that Pepe and Fridman practice: norcini. “This is the people like us,” Pepe says. “They produce traditionally, they butcher the whole animal. They use every part of the animal.”
Il Mercato
La Salumina’s labels, a pretty, pale peach with coral accents and cut-aways that reveal the inside product, stand out against the retail space’s gleaming white subway tiles. Stuffed salumi by “imaginary grocer” Yuki & Daughters hangs from meat hooks behind the counter. (You may recognize the delectable, inedible creations from the Whitney Museum gift shop.)
The carefully picked foodstuffs are as visually appealing, with their clean packaging, as they are delectable. The selection is limited, due to both space constraints and curatorial choice. The emphasis is strictly on quality not quantity, a disruption of that distinctly American mentality that idealizes infinite options. “We don’t have too many things. It is very selective,” Pepe says. “It doesn’t make sense with our production style to buy products that everybody has. The idea is not that you are coming into the supermarket with your bag and you’re picking up your product. We do a different kind of work with the clients. We explain, we educate people. If somebody wants to buy olive oil, I can explain my olive oils. I can give you a suggestion. If you want to use it for cooking, I don’t want you to buy a $30 bottle of olive oil.”
Most of the pasta and tomato products are from one brand—Gentile. “Gentile is in a town close to Napoli, they just make pasta...forever,” Pepe says. “It’s very famous for pastificio artigianale [artisanal pasta]. So you don't make any mistakes with this kind of pasta. I think it's the best pasta in the world.” That’s the kind of endorsement behind every product choice.
The cheese, when not from upstate farms like Old Chatham Creamery, is sourced from New York City through an Italian distributor and friend. The fresh Italian cheeses—burrata, bufala, mozzarella—are made in New Jersey by a childhood friend of Pepe’s and picked up weekly. (The creamery, Lioni, is named for their hometown.) There is Italian balsamic vinegar, half a dozen different olive oils from different regions in Italy, capers, mustard, jams, Baiocchi cookies, flour—both Italian semolina and Hudson Valley-grown Wild Hive, 2 Queens Coffee, chocolate bars, and legumes. (“Umbria is very famous for legumes,” Pepe says proudly.)
They also have a small selection of ciders and beers from New York producers. “There are a few breweries up here that are so ubiquitous, like Catskill and Upward, that people were not purchasing them here,” Friedman says. “So the beers that we’re working with tend to be mostly New York City-based. They’re people we’ve been working with over the years, whose product you can’t find up here, but they’re doing a really good job.” Some of the four-packs on offer are from West Kill Brewing, Transmitter, Folksbier, and Finback. “We don’t have a lot of space,” she adds, “so we try to rotate.” The ciders are from well-reputed natural cideries in New York like Sundstrom and Aaron Burr.
During the pandemic, La Salumina launched veggie boxes, which Friedman describes as a non-committal CSA. These curated produce pick-ups are sourced from nearby Sullivan County farms like Somewhere in Time and Sprouting Dreams Farm. “When we started offering this in COVID, it was to give people coming from the city access to fresh produce,” Friedman says. “It was more a service we were providing rather than something for our business.” Now, customers use the veg boxes as a departure point for their shopping and build out from there, add on other products from the store.
Looking Forward
Come summer, Friedman hopes to set out some tables on the sidewalk, so customers and people passing on the rail trail can stop in and have themselves a little picnic. The second phase of USDA approval, which they hope to get in early fall, will allow La Salumnia to delve deeper into whole-muscle charcuterie—lonza, capocollo, and of course, prosciutto. (They are currently able to offer guanciale and pancetta, which are also whole-muscle products, because they are both intended for cooking.) “So for right now, with the exception of those two products, we are basically taking the whole thing and turning it into little, teeny, tiny cubes and grinding it to make salami and sausage and all the other stuff,” Friedman says, ruefully.
When eager customers ask how long before the prosciutto will be ready, Friedman explains the multistep process, in which time is a non-negotiable ingredient, and tells them not to expect it before 2024. “It takes a few years to get up and running, until you have a cycle,” she says. “We’re never going to have all of the products all the time if we continue to work with full animals, because certain things are going to sell out faster. That's just the nature of the game. It's much better for small farms to be selling whole animals. And it's easier for them to do what they're doing, which is what we support. So it's about changing the way people think about it.”
