Pepperoni
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pepperoni is a spicy Italian-American variety of dry salami made of beef, pork and often veal. Pepperoni is a descendant of the spicy salamis of Southern Italy, such as salsiccia Napoletana piccante, a spicy dry sausage from Naples. Pepperoni is frequently used as a pizza topping in American-style pizzerias. It is the most popular pizza topping in North America.
Pepperoni is a corruption of peperoni, the Italian plural of peperone, referring to the bell pepper, so that ordering "peperoni" pizza in Italy is often an unwelcome surprise for North American tourists, not to mention the disgust of Italian tourists in English-speaking parts of the world. To order the American version of pepperoni in Italy, someone would request salame piccante or salamino piccante (spicy salami, generally typical of Calabria). In Spain, one would ask for "chorizo," which is itself a bit of a misnomer since the word "chorizo" simply means "sausage" in Spanish. If one orders "sausage" in the US, of course, they'll receive a different kind of ground sausage. Throughout continental Europe, peperone is a common word for various types of capsicum including and black pepperbell pepper and a small, spicy and often pickled pepper known as peperoncino or peperone piccante in Italy and sometimes as pepperoncini in the US. Unlike in Europe, the English word is used as a singular uncountable noun.
