At a glance
- Filling: Dry-cured pork salame, sliced to order into rounds
- Cut: Rounds about 2 to 3 mm thick, laid overlapping, four to six to a roll
- Bread: A crusted white roll such as a rosetta, filoncino or ciabatta, split but left hinged
- Dressing: None; a thin film of butter or olive oil in some bars
- Served: Cool, from the bar's glass case or cut to order at the salumeria
- Country: Italy, nationwide; the salame changes with the region
A bar in Italy keeps its salame within arm's reach of the counter, a stick or two hanging from a hook or lying on the slicer's table with the casing half peeled back. The order is spoken in a few words, "un panino al salame", and the barista splits a roll, sets a flywheel machine whirring, and lets the rounds fall onto a square of paper one over another, each landing slightly offset like roof tiles. The whole job takes under a minute. Four to six rounds go in, the roll is closed with the heel of a hand, and the paper is folded round it. Nothing is toasted, nothing is spread, and the person in front of the counter is already holding it before the coffee machine has finished.
Everything the sandwich offers is decided by how thick that blade is set. Cut at two or three millimetres, a round of salame keeps its grain: the pale fat flecks stay as separate beads in the lean, and each slice has enough body to bend over the roll without tearing. Run it thinner and the round goes translucent and floppy, sticking to the paper like wet leaf. Run it thicker and the tooth meets a rubbery coin that pulls the whole filling loose at the first bite. The right slice gives a small snap at the front teeth, then softens as the fat warms against the tongue, and the pepper and garlic and a trace of wine in the cure come up slowly from underneath.
The roll does its part by staying plain and a little dry. A rosetta, a filoncino, or a ciabatta from the bar's morning delivery has a crust that crackles against the palm and a crumb that takes up the loosened fat from the salame without collapsing. Italians who care about such things ask for the bread to be split on one side only, so the roll closes like a book and the rounds cannot slide out. Butter shows up in northern bars, where a thin smear on the bottom half rounds off the salt; further south the roll often goes in bare, or with a drizzle of oil. A pickle or a leaf of lettuce counts as an intrusion in most places, since the salame is already seasoned and the bread has the salt to match.
The name on the order slip tells you little, because "salame" covers a whole country of cures, and the counter holds whichever one the region has made for centuries. In Lombardy it tends to be a fine-grained Milano with a gentle garlic edge. Around Parma, a hand-tied Felino reads sweet and faintly winy. Tuscan bars reach for a coarse, peppery stick with chunky fat, Naples leans toward a firm smoked pepper salame, and in Calabria the same order returns something that makes the eyes water. Locals seldom say which salame they want, since the bar has already chosen it. Visitors learn the local salame the same way they learn the local coffee, by asking for the generic and receiving the regional.
The panino al salame is eaten standing, often in under five minutes, at the hours Italians use for small meals: mid-morning, the long tail of lunch, the late afternoon. It travels in schoolbags, train compartments and the glove boxes of delivery vans, wrapped in the same paper it was handed over in, and it keeps well for hours because dry-cured pork carries little water to share with the crumb. On a train it is the sandwich of choice for exactly that reason. Open the paper on the second leg of a journey and the salame has taken the warmth of the carriage, its fat glossier and its spice more forward than at the counter.
The slicer behind the counter
The sliced panino depends on a machine, and the machine has a date. The Dutch firm Berkel, founded in Rotterdam on 12 October 1898 by the butcher Wilhelmus Adrianus van Berkel, produced a hand-cranked slicer with a rotating circular blade and a sliding carriage that held the meat against it. The red flywheel that became the company's emblem was a later addition. Before such machines a counterman cut each round by knife, and the thickness of a salame slice depended on the wrist of whoever stood at the board.
Berkel opened an Italian operation in Milan in 1924, under the name Officine Berkel, which made scales at first, and the red slicer on the counter became a fixture of Italian salumerie and bars over the following decades. Sources do not say when the slicer first reached a given Italian shop, and the earlier knife-cut salame sandwich certainly existed before it. What the machine changed was consistency: the same two- or three-millimetre round, bar after bar.
That is why a Milanese slicer and a Calabrian one still make a recognisable sandwich out of such different salami. The cure varies from one province to the next, but the blade setting travels with the machine, and every counter in the country hands the customer a roll closed over rounds cut to nearly the same thin overlapping fall.