Panino

Ask for "un panino" at an Italian bar and the opening sound is the knife: a serrated blade sawing through a crust that crackles audibly, then the soft thud of a split roll opened flat on the board. The word covers the whole sequence. Panino is the diminutive of pane, bread, so it names a small loaf before it names any filling, and a bakery will sell you a bag of panini that are nothing but roll. The sandwich sense is a short step along. The full phrase is panino imbottito, a stuffed little loaf, and in daily speech the second word drops away until the roll and the sandwich share one name.

That shared name is why the form has so few rules. A panino is any split roll closed around something, and the roll is the variable that gives each one its character. A hollow rosetta crunches and shatters and suits a few folds of ham. A ciabatta, whose open crumb is usually credited to the baker Arnaldo Cavallari of Adria in 1982, has big holes that take up olive oil and grilled vegetable juices. A soft michetta or a sesame-topped roll gives way under the teeth and carries a cutlet. The counter fits the bread to the filling the way a tailor fits cloth to a customer, and the tailoring is most of the skill.

Fillings range from one thing to five. A few slices of prosciutto crudo in a crackling roll is a classic, and so is mortadella thick enough to hold its own fat, but the bar menu also lists cutlets with arugula, tuna with tomato, ham with fontina, roasted peppers with anchovy, and combinations that cross a dozen regions. Some counters press the closed roll between hot ridged plates, which flattens the crumb, browns the stripes into the crust and turns a slice of cheese into a glossy seam. Others leave it cold and unpressed. The steam off a freshly pressed one smells of toasted flour and warm salumi, and the cheese at the edges is hot enough to scald the lip on the first bite.

The format fits the Italian working day. A panino is the standing lunch of the office clerk, the school-trip packed bag, the train-station platform and the football terrace, eaten in a few minutes with a coffee or a small beer. It is cheap enough for students, portable enough for travelers, and fast enough for the bar to turn a queue at noon. Because the vocabulary is so loose, it takes in nearly every filled roll in the country: the porchetta roll from a roadside truck, the lampredotto roll from a Florentine cart, the Sicilian pane con la milza and the sausage roll at the market. Each has its own name and its own page here.

Outside Italy the word travelled with the pressed version. English-language writers often use panini as a singular, so "a panini" turns up on café menus from London to Seattle, while Italian speakers keep panino for one and panini for several. One source dates a first American reference to 1956; the etymology dictionaries point to the 1970s for English, and the sources do not settle which marks the real arrival. What the English menu usually means is narrower than the Italian word: a ciabatta-style roll with melting cheese, clamped on a grill. In Italy the same word still covers the cold roll wrapped in paper at a market stall.

Origin and history

No inventor is on record for the filled roll. A sixteenth-century Italian cookbook is cited as holding a precursor, though sources that mention it do not name the book or its recipe, so it is best taken as an attestation of the idea and not of the name. The dated history of the word begins in the cities of the twentieth century, where the panino moved from the home and the tavern into the bar, sliced to order from a counter of cured meat and cheese.

The counter format reached its public peak in Milan. By the early 1980s a bar called Al Panino, variously placed on via Agnello and on piazza Liberty depending on the account, had given its name to a crowd of teenagers who dressed in Timberland boots, Moncler jackets and 501 jeans and became the paninari. Il Post stresses that the label came from the bar and had little to do with what they ate. The bar's name was the plain word for the thing it sold, and the youth culture borrowed it whole, which gives a measure of how ordinary the word already was.

The paninari did their loitering elsewhere. Their best-known gathering spot was the Burghy on piazza San Babila, the first of Italy's American-style fast-food chains, opened in 1981, where the menu ran to hamburgers. A subculture named for a sandwich bar met in a hamburger shop. The chain counted 96 Italian outlets by 1995, according to Il Post, before McDonald's acquired it, and by then the plain word panino had passed through a youth fad, a fast-food rival and a fashion label without changing meaning at the bar, where the knife still sawed through the crust and the roll still opened flat on the board.