Spotted: Seltzer’s Smokehouse Meats in Palmyra, PA

Cost: $6 to 9 per pound

Attraction: It looks nothing like Oscar Mayer.

Where to buy: Sure, you could visit your local deli counter, or you could go old school and order from Lancaster County’s Kunzler & Company (1-888-KUN-ZLER), providing fine meat sticks since 1901.

In grade school, I was the "things that should never go in a lunch box" depository. Lent was my season, of course. What kid wants tuna fish? But I was non-denominational, and international. Pickled herring, spam, gizzards, curried tofu — I'd trade my PB&J for just about anything. One of my friends always had a sandwich containing any number of obtuse sliced meats, which is how I came to love head cheese. Keep in mind, the 8-year-old palate doesn't stretch very far. But once a month, his family would get a shipment of Pennsylvania delicacies, including a log of Lebanon bologna. On white bread with swiss and mustard, it was the most mysterious thing I'd ever eaten.

Lebanon bologna looks a tad like a giant summer sausage, deeply colored and polka dotted with much tinier fatty bits like so many inverse freckles, but it has a similar saucer circumference to its log, more like traditional bologna. A smoked, all-beef sausage also known as sweet bologna (for some inexplicable reason), the Lebanon variety of bologna goes through a fermentation that imparts an almost acidic taste that keeps its richness from being too cloying. The smokiness comes across as sweet more than it does mesquite. And the particular spicing of Lebanon bologna has an exotic quality in the vein of nutmeg, clove, pepper, and perhaps a touch of cinnamon. On any given day, it's either addictive or domineering.

Why I heart Lebanon bologna long time: It's an affordable way to add a tremendous amount of flavor to a buggy load of dishes. My momma raised me thrifty, so I stopped splurging for pancetta and prosciutto a few percentage points of the Euro ago. No matter, I just chop a few slices of Lebanon bologna into little pieces and fry it up with shallots and frozen peas for my carbonara. It makes an impossibly quick dressing if you fry it in olive oil — maybe with a squeeze of lemon — and pour it over spinach. It's the secret ingredient in my sage cornbread stuffing. Anything bacon can do, Lebanon bologna does sexier. And it's easier to have on hand than a huge pack of the former, as well as far cheaper than prosciutto. Sure, an Italian would crap gnocchi at my substitutions, but we're American and so is Lebanon bologna.  The moniker "Lebanon" refers to a valley in Pennsylvania, as opposed to the country in the Middle East. This style of tubular meat hails from Pennsylvania Dutch country and is second only to that particularly PA delicacy: scrapple! (Oh, but that's another column…)

P.S. – Yes, I sang B-O-L-O-G-N-A every time I typed it.

Maggie Savarino Dutton is an industry veteran who has played bartender, sommelier and line cook and who now consults. She writes "Search & Distill," which appears every Wednesday in the Seattle Weekly, and maintains The Wine Offensive, her blog about wine, food, and anything else that might be discussed over the bar.

Bologna photo from Mirandala via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Point of Purchase" photograph by Roadsidepictures via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Pantry" photograph by Áslaug Snorradóttir.