Sausage, Cudighi

The first cudighi I ever ate came from Tino’s Bar and Pizza in Negaunee, in the summer of 2010. I had Chris — my German exchange student, from Hamburg — and his girlfriend, now his wife, along with me, and the whole point of the trip was feeding them things they had never had and in most cases had never heard of. A cudighi qualifies twice over: it isn’t German, it isn’t American in any way they’d have recognized, and it barely exists outside three towns in Michigan. We all ordered one. It hooked me on the spot.

So what is it? A cudighi is a fresh northern-Italian pork sausage: coarse-ground, moistened with red wine, and seasoned with the spices you’d otherwise put in a cookie — cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice. Warm and sweet-edged against the pork and garlic, and completely unlike the sausage most Americans mean by “Italian.”

The giveaway is what’s missing: there’s no fennel. Fennel is the signature of southern Italian sausage, and cudighi didn’t come from the south. It came off the boat with Lombard iron miners into Negaunee and Ishpeming in the late 1880s, and it stayed there. Outside Marquette County, almost nobody has heard of it.

This is my working formula, not a shop’s. Every cudighi recipe that matters is a guarded secret — Mario Gallizioli kept his under wraps in 1936, and Tino’s and Lawry’s still do. What follows is built from the one reputably published measured recipe plus what I know from grinding sausage, and it is honestly labeled: I have made a lot of sausage, but I have not yet made this. See the Notes for where every number came from.

Ingredients

• Meat
• 5 lb pork butt (Boston butt), untrimmed — you want 25–30% fat
• Cure/season (weigh if you can)
• 1 1/2 Tbsp kosher salt (~34 g = 1.5% of meat weight — see Notes)
• 1 tsp black pepper, freshly ground
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg, freshly grated
• 1/2 tsp allspice
• 1/4 tsp clove, ground
• 1/4 tsp mace
• 1/4 tsp ginger, ground
• 1/2 to 1 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes, to taste
• 4 cloves garlic, minced fine
• Liquid
• 1/2 cup dry red wine, cold
• 1/2 cup ice water
• Optional — the historical version
• Substitute 1 lb venison or lean beef for 1 lb of the pork (see Notes: Gallizioli ran about 20% game)

Directions

Key ingredients

Cinnamon

1. Black Pepper

Salt

1. This makes 5 lb, which sounds like a lot until you remember it freezes perfectly and you will want more. Halve it if you must.
2. Keep everything cold:
3. This is the whole game in sausage making. Warm fat smears instead of cutting, and smeared fat renders straight out in the pan and leaves you a dry, crumbly patty. Put the diced meat, the grinder auger, the blade, and the plate in the freezer for 30–45 minutes before you start. The meat should be firm at the edges but not frozen solid. → photo 2
4. Dice and chill:
5. Cut the pork butt into 1-inch cubes. Do not trim the fat — that 25–30% is doing structural work, and a lean cudighi is a sad thing. Spread the cubes on a sheet pan and freeze until stiff-edged.
6. Mix the spices first:
7. Combine the salt, pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, clove, mace, ginger, and red pepper in a small bowl and stir them together before they go anywhere near the meat. Mixing dry spices into cold meat unevenly is how you end up with one patty that tastes like a snickerdoodle and another that tastes like nothing.
8. Grind:
9. Grind through a coarse plate (3/8”, or 10 mm). Cudighi is a rustic, open-textured sausage — you should be able to see the grain. If you like it finer, run half the batch through a 1/4” plate and leave the rest coarse; that gives you bind and texture at once. → photo 3
10. Season and mix:
11. Scatter the spice mix and the garlic over the ground meat, then pour in the cold wine and ice water. Mix — by hand in a cold bowl, or with a paddle on low for 60–90 seconds — until the mass turns noticeably sticky and starts clinging to itself and to your hand. That tackiness is myosin extraction, and it is what holds a patty together. Under-mix and it crumbles; over-mix and it goes rubbery. Stop when a handful stays put when you turn your palm over.
12. Rest — do not skip this:
13. Cover tightly and refrigerate 24 to 48 hours before cooking. Every independent cudighi recipe converges on this, and it is not superstition: the salt needs time to work into the muscle, and the sweet spices need time to move out of their granules and through the fat. A cudighi cooked the same day tastes like pork with cinnamon sprinkled on it. A cudighi rested two days tastes like cudighi.
14. Cook a test patty NOW, though:
15. Before the rest, fry one tablespoon of the mix flat in a pan and taste it. This is your only chance to adjust 5 lb of sausage. Judge the salt and the heat, and know that the sweet spices will read considerably stronger in two days than they do right now — so if the cinnamon is already loud, you have overdone it.
16. Form:
17. After the rest, portion into 4 oz patties pressed wider than your bun (they shrink), or stuff into hog casings in 5–6 inch links, or simply leave it in bulk. Patties are the Marquette County sandwich format; links are more of a home and grill thing. → photo 4
18. Cook:
19. Medium heat in a cast-iron skillet, about 4–5 minutes a side, to an internal 160 °F. Do not press them. Cook them slower than you think — the sugar in the spices will catch and turn bitter over high heat before the middle is done. → photo 5
20. Keep:
21. Three days refrigerated, or freeze. Freeze the patties on a sheet pan first, then bag them, with parchment between.
22. To build the sandwich: Cudighi Sandwich

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t

No historical cudighi recipe with measurements exists. I looked hard. Gallizioli kept his spice blend secret in 1936; Lawry’s and Tino’s describe theirs as secret today. Everything in circulation is a modern reconstruction, and mine is too.

The backbone here is the venison cudighi published by Country Lines, the Michigan electric cooperatives’ member magazine, credited to guest chef Doug Latvala of Michigan Wild — the most reputably published measured cudighi I could find. I halved its spice quantities to a 5 lb batch and made two deliberate changes, flagged here so you can undo them:

1. Salt. Country Lines calls for 3 Tbsp per 10 lb, which lands near 1.2% by weight. I raised it to 1.5%, the standard target for fresh sausage. Weigh it if you can — volume measures of salt vary by nearly 2× between kosher brands. See Salt.
2. All pork by default. Country Lines runs 50/50 venison to pork, which is considerably more game-forward than the historical record supports (see below). I made pork the base and put venison in as a variation.

There is no canonical spice strength. The two best-circulated recipes differ by roughly 3× in spice intensity. Start low. You can add cinnamon to the next batch; you cannot take it out of this one.

Untested by me. I grind sausage — I’ve made Irish bangers with rusk, and cured my own bacon belly and loin, wet and dry — but I have not yet made cudighi. Treat the numbers as a well-reasoned starting point, not a proven formula, and write on this page when you correct it.

Where cudighi came from

Italians came onto the Marquette Iron Range in two distinct waves, and the difference between them explains the sausage.

The first big migration was 1887–88, and it was northern — Lombardy, Piedmont, the Veneto, and the Tyrol — settling in Negaunee. Roughly 50 arrived at first, about 100 more the following spring. By 1910 Italians were 15–16% of the labor force on the Range, and better than 8 in 10 of the employed Italian men were miners. In 1911 the northerners founded the Società Italiana di Mútuo Soccórso Lombarda-Veneta di Negaunee — a mutual aid society whose name records its own origins. A second wave from the south — Calabria, Naples, Sicily — arrived from the 1890s and settled more heavily in Ishpeming.

That sequence is why there’s no fennel in cudighi. The sausage tradition that took root here was Lombard, not Calabrian, and it arrived first. (Source: Northern Michigan University, “Recorded in Stone — Voices on the Marquette Iron Range.”)

The sausage came with the miners. The sandwich was invented here.

These are two different events and it’s worth keeping them apart, because “who invented cudighi” is a badly formed question.

The sausage was a home tradition carried over in the 1880s. Nobody invented it in Michigan.

The sandwich — sausage on a bun, sold to the public — traces to Mario Gallizioli, Ishpeming, 1936. He set up a stand between his family’s barbershop and a neighboring bar and sold homemade sausage sandwiches. Russell Magnaghi, History Professor Emeritus at Northern Michigan University, calls him the “father of the cudighi.”

Two details from Gallizioli’s version are worth sitting with:

• He dressed it with chopped onions, ketchup, and mustard. No mozzarella, no tomato sauce. See Mustard.
• His grind was not all pork — about 20% venison or lean beef. So the game-meat versions floating around today aren’t a modern American corruption of a pure-pork original. Game was in the commercial product from the very beginning.

Magnaghi also names the La Freniere and Barbiere families of Ishpeming as the people who popularized cudighi across the region afterward — popularizers, explicitly not originators, and two names you won’t find in most write-ups.

The shops with famous cudighi are all later, and their claims are about recipe pedigree, not invention: Lawry’s (1946), Congress Pizza / the Bonetti family in Marquette (recipe essentially unchanged since 1957), Jean Kay’s (1975), Tino’s (bought by the Argalls in 1982), Ralph’s Italian Deli (1986). What looks online like a fight over credit is mostly a set of compatible claims about whose recipe is oldest.

The name — and why the usual explanation is wrong

Nearly every source says “cudighi” comes from cotechino, and Wikipedia specifically names Cotechino Modena. That specific claim doesn’t survive contact with the sausage.

Cotechino takes its name from cotica / cotenna — pork rind — and Cotechino Modena IGP is emphatically a rind sausage. Cudighi has no meaningful rind in it at all. Deriving one from the other looks like folk etymology built on a phonetic resemblance.

The actual answer is better, and it’s dialect. In 2017 Magnaghi traced the word — via a descendant of Gallizioli — to the Bergamasque dialect of Lombardy, north of Milan. It baffled local food historians for years precisely because it isn’t standard Italian and doesn’t appear in an Italian dictionary. Being an inconsistently written vernacular is also why the spelling scatters: cudighi, cudighe, cudighy, gudighi.

And it checks out from the Italian side. The Bergamo chamber of commerce lists a traditional local salume under the dialect name “Codeghì de la Bergamasca” — and its own product sheet describes fresh pork leg, shoulder, and coppa with jowl fat, seasoned with black pepper, red wine, spices, aromatics, and fresh crushed garlic, stuffed into 10–12 cm links, eaten mostly fresh, with a short shelf life.

No rind. Fresh, not cured. Muscle meat, red wine, pepper, garlic, short links. That is cudighi, minus a century of Michigan drift.

So: cudighi ← Bergamasque codeghì, itself cognate with cotechino, but by way of a Lombard dialect product that had already dropped the rind. Magnaghi hedges it as “probably the local adaptation of the more standard coteghino,” and that hedge is worth keeping.

The sweet spices are a separate thread. The Bergamasque codeghì’s documented seasoning is savory — pepper, wine, garlic. It doesn’t account for cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg. Those most likely come from a second Lombard tradition, luganega, whose Monza style is documented with white wine, cinnamon, and cloves. Sweet-spicing pork is a genuinely old northern Italian habit, a survival of medieval and Renaissance spice use that lasted in the north long after it faded elsewhere. So cudighi’s spice profile isn’t an American invention — though I’ll flag that the luganega link is my inference from the pattern, not something I found asserted with a hard citation.

Salsiccia matta gets floated occasionally as an ancestor. It isn’t one — wrong region (Tuscan-Emilian Apennines), wrong composition (offal and scrap), no phonetic link.

Two things worth not repeating: it is not Cotechino Modena, and the name “Vittorio Vercelli” — which circulates in some tellings as the inventor — has no traceable connection to any of this. Repeated searching turned up nothing at all.

Variations

• Venison (the historical one). Swap 1 lb of the pork for venison — about 20%, matching Gallizioli. Michigan deer country, and it’s what the original actually was.
• Venison (the modern one). Country Lines goes 50/50. Much more assertive; you may want to push the fat up, since venison brings none.
• Beef. Lean chuck in place of venison behaves about the same.
• Heat. Red pepper flakes vary wildly between recipes. Mine is middling at 1 tsp.
• Whole spices. Some versions steep a cinnamon stick and a whole clove in the wine overnight, then discard them and use the wine. Gentler and rounder than ground spice.

Sourcing and gear

Buying it instead. Cudighi Sandwich covers where to eat one. If you want the sausage itself without making it, Vollwerth Company of Hancock, Michigan makes cudighi in all three formats — a 16 oz bulk roll, patties, and fresh links under the Baroni’s label — and it turns up well beyond the U.P. via upfoods.com, Instacart, DoorDash, Family Fare, and Marketplace Foods. Claims that U.P. purveyors ship frozen patties nationwide are plausible but I did not verify one at checkout.

Grinder. A 3/8” coarse plate is the one that matters. If you only have a stand-mixer grinder attachment it will work, but chill the whole assembly and expect to go slower.

Nutmeg. Grate it fresh. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of what makes it worth having within a few months, and in a sausage this spice-forward you’ll notice.

Wine. Nothing precious. Country Lines calls for Paisano sweet red; a dry red works and is what I’d reach for. The wine is there for moisture and acidity as much as flavor.

Salt. Weigh it. See Salt — kosher brands differ by nearly 2× per tablespoon, which is the difference between seasoned and inedible across 5 lb.

Still open

Magnaghi’s “The Mystery of the Cudighi Solved” (The Chronicle, Winter 2017) is the primary document for the etymology and I have not read it — only reporting about it. His book Classic Food and Restaurants of the Upper Peninsula (History Press, 2022) almost certainly has the shop-by-shop detail that no online source carries. Both are worth tracking down.