Rosemary
Also known as Salvia rosmarinus, Rosmarinus officinalis, Rosmarin, romarin, rosmarino, romero
The Italian herb of pork and lamb, and the most commercially important natural antioxidant in the meat industry. Its needle-like leaf is tough enough to be unpleasant if it is not chopped fine or removed.
Rosemary is a woody Mediterranean evergreen, reclassified in recent years from Rosmarinus officinalis into the sage genus as Salvia rosmarinus, which tells you something about how closely the two are related. Its aroma is pine-resinous and camphorous, from cineole, camphor and pinene, and like sage it is assertive and durable rather than delicate.
In charcuterie it is above all Italian. It seasons porchetta, where whole branches go inside the rolled belly, the Tuscan pork preparations, lardo and the cured fats where its resin cuts richness, and a scattering of salami. It runs through the French and Spanish country traditions, and it pairs with lamb wherever lamb is cured or made into sausage. It is far less used in the German, Polish and British sausage families.
Its industrial credential is worth knowing because it explains labels. Rosemary extract is the most widely used natural antioxidant in processed meat, standardised for carnosic acid and carnosol, and it appears in commercial products specifically to delay lipid oxidation and colour loss. It works, and in many applications it approaches the synthetic antioxidants in effect. For the home curesmith this means that a handful of rosemary in a fatty product is doing something real about rancidity as well as tasting of rosemary. It also means that a purchased spice blend listing rosemary extract is using it as a functional additive rather than for flavour.
The practical problem with rosemary is physical. The leaf is a stiff needle with a waxy cuticle, it does not soften in cooking, and a whole or coarsely chopped needle in a sausage is genuinely unpleasant to eat and can be sharp. Traditional practice either chops it very finely, uses whole sprigs that are removed before serving as in a porchetta or a braise, or infuses it in fat or brine and strains it out.
Fresh and dried both work, with dried noticeably more concentrated and more resinous. Doses are modest, typically 0.5 to 2 g per kilo of meat for dried leaf, and rosemary shares sage's failure mode: past its window it reads as medicinal, and it will not cook out.