After she moved to the United States
in 1967, Valencia-born (Spain, that is) Juana Gimeno de Faraone missed her country's
regional sausages. In 1982, she mortgaged her home in Torrance and bought a small
sausage-making deli. "I wanted a business, and I loved cooking," she
explains. "Sausages didn't seem intimidating because in Spain they're made in
farm homes." She enlisted a family friend, a priest, to help her hone her
recipes and traveled around Spain garnering advice from village sausage makers and larger
industrial producers. Today La Espanola Meats, her modest-size Harbor City factory,
turns out perfect duplicates of the finest Spanish hams and sausages: garlicky
Segovian cantimpalo, Majorcan sobrasada spiked with Spanish paprika, Catalonian butifarra,
semicured chorizo Bilbao and prosciutto-like Serrano ham. The meats are hand-chopped
and dry cured or marinated in small batches to control the character of each style.