The restaurant

The “Statuta civitatis Mutinae” of 1327, which also includes items of 13th-century statutes lost today, tell of the controls of the Comune of Modena and, in particular, document that of the Judges of Victuals on butchers, on sausage-makers and lard-makers, an autonomous corporation created in 1547.On the occasion of the marriage of Alfonso II d’Este in 1565, Modena also gifted various food items to the king, including 17 kilos of yellow sausages, which the Ferrarese sausage-makers were very familiar with for a regular supply of this expensive aromatic and spicy hot yellow sausage.According to a recipe of the first half of the seventeenth century, the Modenese sausage-makers added ginger, cinnamon, cloves, saffron and finely grated grana cheese in different proportions, to the basic mixture, in addition to salt and pepper, to give the mixture its characteristic yellowish colour.In various treatises of the sixteenth-seventeenth century, from Messisbugo to Tanara, the recipe for yellow sausage is given; the mock-heroic poems of the ages also mention it like a dream, as a feast or a gift, starting with Tassoni.The yellow sausage was sold at controlled prices in Modena throughout the eighteenth century, although it came to be used mainly in private homes and no longer in shops up to 1821, after which it just disappeared.The Pizzicagnolo Giuseppe Giusti in 1862 tried to revive the Salsiccia Fina under the name of Cervellato di Milano, according to what appears in an article of the Modenese periodical, “Il Difensore”; the use of this sausage was then lost and only a memory remains, which seems to fade away into legend.In 2005 the Salsiccia Gialla Fina was re-created with a contemporary flavour, thanks to the efforts of chef Paolo Reggiani and Rosalba Caffo Dallari, the gourmet scholar.