Piadina con Crescenza

A spatula at a chiosco outside Cesena pulls a freckled piadina from the iron testo the moment a customer hands across an order, and the cook drops a heaped scoop of crescenza from a steel tub onto the centre of the warm disc with the back of a wide knife. The cheese is white and almost flowing at room temperature, kept in the kiosk fridge through the morning so it goes on cold. It hits the hot round and slackens within seconds. The cook works the back of the knife across the disc in one wipe to spread the cheese to the edges, lays a single slice of prosciutto crudo over the top, folds the round in half across the filling, and presses the seam closed in the hand of the customer waiting at the wooden ledge.

The cheese is Lombard, the bread is Romagnol, and the fold is the moment the two travel together. Crescenza, sold under the name stracchino when it has matured a few days longer, is a fresh cow's-milk cheese from Lombardy with no rind, a two-to-seven-day matured paste, and a consistency so soft it spreads like thick cream and so mild it reads as little more than tang and milk. The piadina, an unleavened wheat round shortened with lard or oil and cooked dry on a hot iron plate, is the carrying flatbread of Romagna, the protected regional flatbread shaped to fold warm without cracking. Spread one cold cheese on one hot bread, fold it over within seconds, and the slackened paste sinks into the wheat crumb the moment it gets there.

The whole sandwich is heat and timing. The piadina needs the testo running steady at the high working heat used for griddle bread, hot enough that a palm cannot rest over it for more than a beat, so the disc freckles in pale brown patches and stays pliable rather than going to a brittle cracker. The cheese needs to be cold from the fridge at the second it is spread, so the contrast between the cool cheese and the warm bread is sharp before the heat erases it. The fold is closed at once. A minute later the cheese has gone from a thick spread to a slack milky pool and the bread has lost its warmth, and what should have been the moment of the build is gone.

The build fails in three specific ways. A piadina taken off the testo too late stiffens to a cracker that splits at the fold and the cheese leaks at the broken edge; pulled at the right moment it flexes around the filling without tearing. Crescenza warmed on the back counter before service, rather than kept cold until the spread, goes from a soft paste to a watery film inside ten minutes and weeps through the lower face of the bread; held in the kiosk fridge and used straight from there, the cool paste meets the heat at the moment of assembly and slackens at a controlled rate. A round overloaded with cheese reads as one thick wet middle and a thin dry rim; a round with the cheese pushed evenly to the edges reads through every bite. Nothing wet is added that the unleavened bread cannot absorb.

Take a fold from the ledge and the parcel is warm and a little heavy in the hand, the freckled disc giving slightly under a fingertip pressed at the seam. The first mouthful registers a soft bread yielding at the teeth, a quiet baked-cereal aroma rising off the warm round with a faint trace of rendered lard, then the cool tang of the cheese arrives a beat behind, milky and slightly acid against the heat. The prosciutto comes through last as a long savoury salt that the cheese has tempered. The fold steams at the open edge as the bite continues. A small white drip is on the napkin at the close. The cheese is doing the work of a sauce here, sinking into the bread crumb rather than sitting on top of it.

The order at the chiosco is short. A regular outside Forlì or Ravenna will ask for una con squacquerone, using the Romagnol name of the slightly looser local form of the same cheese family, or for una crescenza e crudo, the cheese with the ham, or simply la classica, the classic, since the cheese-and-ham fold is the year-round signature of the Romagnol kiosk. The kiosks above Rimini will quote the price by the fold, and the standard daytime order is a fold and a small beer at the wooden ledge in front of the kiosk window, eaten standing in five minutes.

The near relatives stay around the Lombard cheese and change one partner. The squacquerone e rucola fold pairs the cheese with a heavy handful of raw peppery rocket, no meat, and is the year-round Romagnol bestseller; the prosciutto e squacquerone sets the same cheese against the cured ham without the leaf; the erbe di campo build trades the cheese for foraged hedge greens cooked in oil and garlic; the plain piadina romagnola alone with no filling is the unadorned bread the cheese rests against. Each is a separate kiosk item with its own price on the board.

A Lombard Cheese on a Romagnol Bread

The cheese has a longer and better documented history than the fold. Crescenza and stracchino are documented in Lombard cheese making from the medieval period onward, the two names used interchangeably for the same fresh cow's-milk cheese with different maturations, and the looser Romagnol form has carried the local name squacquerone in monastic and episcopal correspondence at least since the late eighteenth century, when the bishop of Cesena Cardinal Bellisomi wrote asking for an explanation of a particular delivery of the cheese. The Squacquerone di Romagna received EU Protected Designation of Origin status under Commission Implementing Regulation 679/2012 of 24 July 2012, which fixes the production area across the provinces of Bologna, Ferrara, Forlì-Cesena, Ravenna, Rimini, and parts of Pesaro and Urbino.

The bread carries an older record still. Among the church levies on the Romagnol countryside surveyed in the fourteenth century by a papal legate, two piade are listed as part of one tenant's annual duty in kind, with the period recipe noted in the same instrument as a sparse mix of grain flour with water and salt, sometimes supplemented by milk and a knob of lard. The modern Italianised name and the bread's modern regional fame were fixed centuries later by the poet Giovanni Pascoli, whose short verse La piada appeared in print in 1900 and was collected into a verse volume in 1909; Pascoli took the Romagnol dialect word into standard Italian and christened the round the national bread of his region. EU Protected Geographical Indication status for Piadina Romagnola arrived on 4 November 2014, with the regulation codifying the lard-or-oil unleavened wheat dough and recognising two regional shapes as canonical: the denser, breadier disc associated with the inland baking of Forlì and Ravenna, and the thinner, pliable disc associated with the Rimini coast.

The cheese-and-bread fold itself carries no separately registered specialty. It is a folk preparation of the Romagnol kiosk that travels on the dated paperwork of its two components, the cheese registered as a Romagnol PDO in 2012 by Commission Implementing Regulation 679 and the bread registered as a Romagnol PGI in 2014 by Commission Implementing Regulation 1174, two EU files signed two years apart that between them codify the fold the kiosk in Cesena hands across to its lunch queue.