Bondiola · Argentina · Boston butt
The upper shoulder. Argentina cures and slices it; the American South smokes it whole and pulls it.
Five questions on pork, drawn from 40 cuts named in ten countries. Pork is where the traditions diverge hardest: the same belly is pancetta in Italy, lard fumé in France and Bauchspeck in Germany, and Spain has cuts off the shoulder — secreto, pluma, presa — that most butcheries never separate at all.
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Each row is a real link in the catalog. Pork's pairs are mostly about curing: the same leg or belly, aged by traditions that disagree about salt, smoke and time.
The upper shoulder. Argentina cures and slices it; the American South smokes it whole and pulls it.
Michoacán confits the lower shoulder in its own lard — the same primal a US butcher labels picnic.
Cured and usually unsmoked, rolled or flat. The uncured belly is the same cut before the salt.
Both are smoked belly; the German version is drier and the French is usually thicker cut.
Both are acorn-fed black pig hind leg from the same Iberian dehesa, divided only by the border across it.
Air-dried hind leg, salted and hung. France uses Adour salt and a shorter cure than Parma does.
The Black Forest ham is cold-smoked over fir; British gammon is wet-cured and sold to be cooked.
The same hind leg — one beech-smoked for months, the other roasted the day it is bought.
Brined and lightly smoked loin. Germany sells it as a chop to reheat, Britain slices it for the pan.
One of the five questions asks you to point at the animal. These are the primals the pork diagram is divided into.
Bondiola, Boston butt, secreto, presa, pluma.
Carnitas, picnic shoulder — the cheaper half of the shoulder.
Lomo, Kassler, back bacon, pork chop, tenderloin.
Pancetta, Bauchspeck, lard fumé, samgyeopsal, streaky bacon.
Baby back, spare ribs, costillar de cerdo.
Presunto, jamón, prosciutto, Schinken, gammon — every cured ham.
Eisbein, pork knuckle, codillo — the braise or the beer hall.
Cheek, jowl, guanciale — the cuts most catalogs skip.
Mostly the border. Both are acorn-fed Iberian black pig hind leg cured from the same dehesa woodland that spans Spain and Portugal. Presunto de Barrancos is the Portuguese protected name; jamón ibérico de bellota is the Spanish one.
Same cut, different treatment. Pancetta is belly cured in salt and spices and usually not smoked; American bacon is belly cured and smoked. Bauchspeck and lard fumé are the German and French smoked versions.
Three cuts Spanish butchers take off the Iberian pig's shoulder that most other traditions leave inside the shoulder roast. They are among the reasons this quiz has more pork cuts than a British or American butchery counter would recognise.
Because in Mexico it names a specific piece of the animal and its preparation together, the way brisket does in Texas. The catalog is the union of butchery traditions, not the intersection of their translations.
The board on this page changes through the day. The daily board at /guess is one shared set of five for everybody, mixing all three animals, and /guess/practice reshuffles on every load.