Sobrasada

Sobrassada in Catalan, or sobrasada in Spanish, is a raw, cured sausage from the Balearic Islands made with ground pork, paprika, salt and other spices. Sobrassada, along with botifarró, are traditional Balearic meat products prepared in the laborious but festive rites that still mark the autumn and winter pig slaughter known as a matança in Minorca, Majorca and Ibiza. The chemical principle that makes sobrassada is the dehydration of meat under certain weather conditions (high humidity and mild cold) which are typical of the late Balearic autumn. After centuries of Muslim rule of the Iberian Peninsula, pork consumption returned to the region in the Middle Ages. Paprika was added after the spice was brought back from the Americas in the 15th century. Sobrassada is thought to have originated and expanded, as a culinary concept, in the Crown of Aragon-controlled Western Mediterranean (Sicily, Balearic Islands, Sardinia) after the 14th century, as similar sausages are still made in this region.[citation needed] In a traditional Mediterranean diet, containing little meat, as Mallorca had until the 1950s, sobrassada and related pork sausages were the main and sometimes only sources of pork for Mallorcans. Larger meat cuts such as pork or lamb roasts, pork steaks or beef cuts were largely festive dishes, or restricted to the well-off. Even today dishes such as porcella rostida, a whole roasted suckling pig, are only served on special occasions.

Source: Wikipedia