Cotechino is a sausage spiced with meaning. It’s a wide, cooked, usually pork sausage served in winter, and especially around Christmastime, that evokes nostalgia in Italians the way Hoppin’ John or oyster stew does with Southerners, or lutefisk and lefse does in Minnesota.

Turns out it’s not hard to make, if you’ve made a few batches of sausage before. Even if not, it’s not that challenging.

Let’s start with what the heck is cotechino, anyway? Flavorwise, it lives in the same galaxy as traditional summer sausage in that you use “Christmas” spices like coriander, allspice, cinnamon and ground ginger.

Normally this is a pork sausage, but so long as you have some pork or beef fat in there, you can use other meats. The cotechino you see in the picture was made with duck and pork. One thing that makes this a unique sausage is the presence of skin. Yes, skin. It’s cooked, and ground fine.

What the addition of skin does is a) makes use of an often unloved bit of the animal, and b) improves the texture of the sausage, making it kinda bouncy. It’s the collagen. I can tell you that you do not notice it as skin, but you do notice the neat new texture, if you are used to eating regular sausages.

If you want to make cotechino at home, you will need some special equipment, however, a meat grinder chief among them. Ideally, you also have a sausage stuffer, too. That said, you can make cotechino without either casings or a stuffer, and I’ll get into that in a moment.

I do recommend that you buy casings for this, and for real-deal cotechino, they need to be wide beef middles. (I buy mine from The Sausage Maker.) These are cleaned intestines of a cow and are far wider, and a bit tougher, than standard hog casings. I suppose you could use wide, artificial “summer sausage” casings, too, but where’s the fun in that?

Another interesting thing about cotechino is that after you make the sausage in the usual way, which I’ll get into below, you hang it, uncooked, for several days to ripen. You need some curing salt to do this safely, but it’s less than a spoonful. This process improves flavor and texture, and tightens the sausage in its skin.

You can skip both the curing salt — because I know some of you out there have this weird fear of nitrite, and some others are actively allergic to it — and long curing process, and your cotechino will still be OK, but it won’t be a pretty pink or as good as these are. If you do skip the curing salt and hanging process, you will only hang your sausages for a few hours.

Regardless, when you are done hanging them, you will need to cook your sausages. Cotechino is gently poached in salty water for about an hour. And when I mean gently, I mean it. You want 160°F, which is steaming water, not simmering. This sets everything nicely.

You can eat your cotechino at this point, but most people will sear the sausages in pork fat or olive oil, either with the casing on or off. I peeled mine off. Beef casings are thick, and this is not a hard sausage, so the eating experience was better with skinless links.

If you want to make cotechino without casings or a sausage stuffer, here’s what you do. After grinding and mixing, you lay out big sheets of plastic wrap on a large work surface, and when I say big I mean like two or even three feet of it. You want two layers. Lay some sausage mixture in a log in the center of this, and wrap it tightly. You want long ends of plastic wrap on either side of the link, and you will need to tie these together.

You wrap the link in the plastic wrap, then roll and tighten it as if it were a big piece of salt water taffy. Then tie the ends of the wrap together. Note that if you do this, you can’t really hang or age your sausage.

Once it’s made, can eat cotechino any way you want, but it’s traditionally seared, sliced and served over lentils. I happen to hate lentils, so I served mine over black beans. You do you.

Cotechino will keep a week to two weeks in the fridge, and it freezes well.