Feeding a Crowd: the Iron Range’s Porketta

The Iron Range is a term used to collectively refer to a series of iron mining areas around Northeastern Minnesota. There are 4 main deposits, discovered in the late 19th Century and mined out over the course of the 20th. In our previous piece discussing the Iron Range, a 2022 writeup of the regional sandwiches called “South Americans,” we noted that during the period from roughly 1890 to 1930, with the influx of immigrants who traveled to Minnesota to work the iron mines, the area had one of the most diverse populations in the US at the time.

Forty-three different nationality groups populated the Iron Range. The earliest immigrants were Finnish, Swedish, Slovenian, Canadian, Norwegian, Cornish, or German. After 1900, the origins of the population expanded, with Italian, Croatian, Polish, Montenegrin, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Slovak, Hungarian, and Greek immigrants filling mining jobs. A sizeable Jewish population started main street businesses. Chinese immigrant men ran restaurants and laundries.

“How Immigrants Shaped the Iron Range,” David LaVigne, minnpost.com

Italians began immigrating to the Iron Range in the late 1890s and early 1900s, often after working the mines of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula rather than directly from Italy, peaking around 1910. Italian communities began to form in the towns of the range, “Little Italys” with Italian groceries and other businesses. Other ethnicities may have outnumbered the Italians, but they had an outsized impact on the culinary character of the area. By my rough count, approximately 20% of the recipes in the cookbook Come, You Taste: Family Recipes from the Iron Range are explicitly Italian, with an Italian influence on yet more of them, such as the chopped pepperoni added to the aforementioned South Americans.

Porketta is one such explicitly Italian recipe that yet has diverged from its continental namesake. Italian porchetta is a type of pork roast, often made with a section of pork belly wrapped around a section of pork loin, rubbed inside and out with herbs and spices, roasted hard with the skin facing outward to develop a crisp, crackling surface.

The Iron Range’s take on porchetta is similar… but different. Like many a crowd-friendly pork recipe, it uses pork butt rather than belly or loin, butterflied, rubbed inside and out with garlic and herbs and spices, rolled up and trussed like an Italian porchetta, but now instead of being roasted hard and crisp, it’s cooked low and slow and long until the meat collapses on itself and can be pulled apart with forks. Italian pulled pork, essentially.

The pork is stuffed with garlic and fennel fronds and parsley, and rubbed with a mixture of garlic powder, powdered toasted fennel seeds, salt, and black pepper. Additionally, I roasted it atop a bed of sliced fennel bulbs. After 4-5 hours in a covered pan at 325° F, the roast fell apart, shredding easily into flavorful, aromatic strands of meat, coated with fat and gelatin, sweet and pungent from garlic and fennel.

On Christmas Eve each year, my family and some friends gather at my mother’s house for a feast of snacks–cheese spreads and crackers, little smokies in barbecue sauce or wrapped in bacon and brown sugar, baked bries, buffalo chicken dips, cookies and pies, cocktails and mulled wine. To this mix, I introduced the above Italian-style pulled porketta, along with Kaiser rolls, hard rolls, 3 kinds of mustard, roasted red peppers, and mild banana peppers for sandwich-making.

The sandwich is simple: just meat in a hard roll, perhaps with some simple yellow mustard or slices of mild pickled banana pepper. I used Colman’s English mustard–I like that sinus sting–and banana peppers, though I also had regular yellow mustard and Dijon available, along with pickles and roasted red peppers. The sweetness of the roasted red peppers would complement the fennel flavor to be sure.

But I enjoyed the pungent blast of the strong mustard and the acidic bite of the pickled peppers cutting through the slick softness of the rich and aromatic pile of meat, just barely contained by the crusty ball of bread.

It’s been some year at the Tribunal, and there’s more to come! 2025 will see us finishing our third run through the alphabet of sandwiches, and starting a fourth! Thanks for reading, and happy new year everyone!