the Italian diet is heavy on pork fat and
offal and, in the north, butter and lard.
This applies to the panino panorama, too.
On a recent visit to Trieste, I came
across the panino con la porzina, a bread
roll filled with boiled shoulder pork,
mustard and sauerkraut, a specialty of
the city’s buffets, nose-to-tail pork
trattorias, and a testimony to its
Habsburg past. It’s not recommended
for the cholesterol-conscious but it’s
irresistibly, unctuously delicious.
In Florence, the trippai, or tripe sellers,
have been plying their trade since the
16th century, when tripe was a cheap
and nutritious alternative to starvation.
At their stalls and kiosks, they cook and
sell all manner of cuts. Some of the stuff
goes into panini, the connoisseurs’
favourite being the one with lampredotto,
or abomasum. For readers not au fait with
the esoteric world of tripe, the abomasum,
reed tripe in butchers’ parlance, is the
fourth stomach of any ruminant, the place
where it digests its food. For the panino,
the lampredotto is boiled with vegetables,
anointed with olive oil, seasoned with
black pepper and ladled into rolls called
semelle. The gently chewy texture of the
frilly tripe contrasts with the softness of
the bread. Heaven for offal lovers, with
the proviso that a little goes a long way.
Then there’s pani ca’ meusa, which
consists of a bread roll, or muffoletta,
cut in half and filled with slices of boiled
calf’s lungs and spleen turned in lard.
It’s a street classic of Palermo – a distinctly
un-Mediterranean snack in a very
Mediterranean city. There are two
versions: schiettu, “single”, with a squirt
of lemon juice, and maritatu, “married”,
with slivers of caciocavallo cheese.A friend of mine, a food and wine writer
and an old Sicily hand, reckons pani ca’
meusa have a whiff of drains, though the
Palermitani seem happy enough to queue
up to buy them. It’s true that the grey
innards and entrails bubbling away in the
vendors’ cauldrons are not a sight for the
squeamish, but once the pani are served- greasy on greaseproof paper – I find
them palatable enough. Let’s say they’re
an acquired taste, a test of character.
In Naples, mozzarella in carrozza,
“mozzarella in a carriage”, consists of
a slice of mozzarella pressed between
two slices of white bread, crusts removed,
dipped in beaten egg yolk and deep-fried.
It leapt to world fame in 1948, when
it guest-starred in Vittorio De Sica’s
neorealist movie Bicycle Thieves. In one
famous scene, to ease the prevailing air
of misery, the man whose bicycle has
been stolen treats his young son to a meal
in a restaurant. He orders mozzarella in
carrozza as if it were a special treat, and the
boy takes obvious delight at tugging at the
strings of sizzling, melting mozzarella with
his teeth. But those were the post-war
years of poverty and hardship and today
mozzarella in carrozza is just another item
in the seemingly endless Neapolitan
street-food repertoire, available not only
in the city itself but also in eateries up
and down the peninsula.S
ince the war, affluence and
modernity have spawned more
sophisticated inventions. From
1977 until last year, when he
wasn’t travelling the country expounding
his theories, self-styled maestro paninaro
Giancarlo Rubaldi of the Bar Schiavoni
in Modena turned the panino into an
art form, elaborating concepts such as
harmony of fillings, quality and traceability
of ingredients and balance of flavour.
Michelin-starred chefs are in on the
act, too. In 2013, Davide Scabin of the
Michelin-starred Combal.Zero restaurant
in Rivoli Castle near Turin designed the
McCombal Burger, a soft sesame-seed roll
laden with tofu burger, tomato, onion,
cucumber, lettuce, wasabi mayo and
potatoes as a playful riposte to ongoing
McDonaldisation.
The fact is that the forces of plenty,
in the form of the standardised offerings
of McDonald’s and the paninoteche,
sandwich bars, that are springing up
everywhere, appeal more to the young
generation than the more gruesome
contrivances, now an endangered species,
of a hungry past. But as panini continue to
evolve, there’s no escaping the innate truth
of the old Victoria Wood gag: “Sandwich
recipe: take two bits of bread. Put them
together, now eat it.” ●Panino al
lampredottoTramezzino86 GOURMET TRAVELLER