An illustrated Philadelphia deli meats primer

Philadelphia deli meats lie somewhere in the Twilight Zone between really-close-to-authentic Italian salumi and completely bastardized, processed cold cuts with vaguely Italian-sounding names. It depends mostly on where you are, and what sort of hoagie you are in the mood for. In some pockets of the city — namely South Philly — hoagies involve hard, seeded Italian loaves stuffed with imported meats that come pretty damn close to what you’d find in the old country or on a salumi plate at Le Virtù. 

But out in the ’burbs, down the Shore, or pretty much at any corner store in Philadelphia, the deli-meat situation becomes decidedly more lowbrow. Torpedo rolls are jammed with sliced pepperoni, bologna, salami and shimmering, neon-pink ham that looks like it came out of a can. The meats are topped with ribbons of shaved iceberg lettuce and shot through with a blast of oregano-spiked salad oil. This isn’t a bad thing, especially if you grew up with it. Here’s a guide to the meats you need to know. 

Real Italian capocollo is pork neck and shoulder that is cured, smoked and rubbed with wine and southern Italian spices, wrapped in pig innards and hung to dry, resulting in a product not all that different from prosciutto. In Philadelphia hoagie shops, gabagool can range from something moderately resembling the style mentioned above to a product known as “hot cappy ham”, basically paprika-rubbed bologna.

A dry pork sausage — flavored with wine, black pepper, red pepper and lots of fat — Italian sopressata is salt-cured, fermented and air-dried, where it becomes covered in mold (the good kind) before being pressed for up to a week to create its signature rustic shape. Of all the hoagie standards, the deli version of sopressata is closest to the authentic version, although it’s likely made by a machine instead of a mustachioed charcuterie wizard in a Calabrian cave. 

From Bologna, Italy, mortadella, the precursor to American bologna, is a finely ground, moist pork sausage studded with chunks of lard and, often, pistachios. Made with emulsified meat and flavored with mace, nutmeg, white pepper and clove, it’s a very different flavor, with a mild, frankfurter-like taste that works as a counterpoint to all the salty, funky dried meats on your hoagie. You’ll find the best at gourmet shops and high-end delis. Otherwise, it’s bologna with stuff jammed into it.

This salami is a mildly spiced beef-and-pork sausage with a slight acidic wine-funk, and it’s one that you would never find on the streets of the Italian city Genoa. Basically an American invention (with a vague link to the very funky, dry, moldy Genoese salame di Sant O’lcese), Genoa salami isn’t likely to be found on a charcuterie plate or any halfway decent “Olde Italian”-style hoagie. Genoa’s flavor is pretty much essential to the suburban, soft-roll-style hoagies that you find at Lee’s Hoagie House.