The aroma of smoked meat wafting through historic downtown Fort Calhoun is enough to stop traffic flowing through the community on U.S. Highway 75. Carnivorous customers with growling stomachs find a remedy for their cravings at Cure.

The steel silhouette of a plump pig hangs outside the former ice cream shop. Inside, smoky smells accompany the sight of curing meat dangling from hooks over the shop’s front counter. One of the smokers was made by repurposing a spare filing cabinet. Glass cases each the size of an apartment medicine chest hold specialty items such as ham salad made with meat from heritage breed hogs. Owner Chad Lebo recently heard about a customer’s 7-year-old son taking Cure’s pork rillette (made from pig head) to school. “I doubt he had any kids asking to trade lunches,” Lebo said.

Lebo was homesick for ham, living in Madagascar, when he began researching how to cure his own meat products. Inspired by techniques inherited from his Mennonite grandparents, Lebo specializes in re-creating once common meat products relished by older generations but harder to find today. He calls it heritage-honoring food.

One example caters to the Danish heritage of the neighboring community of Blair. Danish pioneers founded Dana College there in 1884. Traditional Danish food offerings include rullepølse, a cold cut made from rolled, spiced meat. One of Lebo’s favorite compliments that he receives is when customers say, “Oh, my grandmother used to make that.”

Other region-specific items include schinkenspeck, a dry-cured, dry-aged ham popular in southern areas of Germany. Slanina afumata is a traditional Romanian/Hungarian lardo made from the fattiest part of the pork belly. The product is dry-cured and cold-smoked with spices before being thinly sliced and used like prosciutto. Boerewors is a sausage from South Africa prepared with toasted coriander. Lebo offers much more than meat.

His inventory also includes local honey, black walnut syrup tapped from Omaha trees, onion jam, whole wheat flour and barbecue sauces. The rub Lebo makes for his popular Black Crowe bacon is named after the Omaha butcher-turned-outlaw, Pat Crowe. His most infamous crime was the December 1900 revenge kidnapping of a wealthy meatpacker’s son for $25,000 ransom. 

Lebo’s interest in Nebraska history goes back even earlier. An annual ritual includes smoking bacon over cornhusks and cobs. The technique honors the early homesteaders who cooked this way after leaving their native homes to settle in Nebraska. The practice was necessary since wood wasn’t common across the grassy prairie. Today, a new generation of Nebraska immigrants discovers a welcome taste of home in Lebo’s homemade biltong, a cured meat product similar to beef jerky.

“Southern Africans are just giddy when they get their biltong. They slice it up even before they leave the shop,” Lebo said. Another case of international homesickness cured with a meaty taste from Fort Calhoun.