There's been a recent groundswell of expert handcrafting of Italian-style cured meats, or \o7salumi, \f7here in the U.S. Paul Bertolli's Berkeley-based Fra' Mani and Armandino Batali's Salumi, in Seattle, both turn out phenomenal domestic charcuterie.
Like Batali, a former Boeing exec, and Bertolli, previously longtime chef at Berkeley's Chez Panisse, the Eckhouses came to prosciutto in midlife. After almost 20 years as a seed company executive in Des Moines, three and a half of which were spent (with his wife, Kathy and their children) in Parma, Italy, as president of the company's Italian subsidiary, Herb quit corporate America in 2000. Shortly thereafter, he and Kathy, now in their late 50s, began curing ham in their suburban Des Moines basement.
Living in Parma, they'd fallen in love with the region's famed \o7salumi\f7. Eckhouse locates one epiphanic moment to a dinner he had with a friend at a restaurant that served particularly sublime prosciutto. After a meal that included two plates of it -- and two flasks of Lambrusco -- Herb starting thinking about all those pigs back in Iowa in a radically different light. And he wanted to turn them into prosciutto.
The fact that he'd never made ham before, or that he wasn't Italian (Herb, who was born in Iowa and grew up in Chicago, describes himself as a "Harvard-educated Jewish liberal," while Kathy grew up in Berkeley) didn't faze him. The American tradition of reinvention, says Herb, smiling at the many implicit ironies, "can be liberating." So he befriended a few of Parma's artisan prosciutto makers.
Italy revisited
SETTLED back in the U.S., in their Des Moines basement, the Eckhouses experimented with techniques learned from those artisans. While the hams aged -- watched over by the couple's three then-preteen and teenage children and their fascinated cat -- Kathy read literature on \o7salumi-\f7making, and Herb periodically returned to Europe to continue his research. He revisited Parma and traveled to Langhirano, the town in the province of Parma known for its prosciutto.
Back in Norwalk, a dozen miles down the road from their house, they built a small factory. They built it from the prairie up, to their own specifications and to fit the machinery that they imported -- lock, stock and meat massager -- from Italy. "We tried to figure out something between our refrigerator and this building," says Herb, an angular man with a thicket of graying hair. "We couldn't." The machinery read-outs remain set to Italian even though Herb admits he could reprogram them into English.
