Pizza Bianca con Mortadella

The signature Roman move is the fold. A long length of pizza bianca is pulled off the tray with kitchen scissors at a forno counter, split open lengthwise with a single cut along the side, and lined inside with hand-sliced mortadella. Then the woman behind the counter folds the whole thing in half across its width, wraps it in greaseproof paper, and hands it across with the weight written in pencil on the corner. The folding is what tells you it is the Roman build and not its Tuscan cousin. A schiacciata in Florence is filled flat and eaten as a wide panino; here the bread is longer and lower, and folded once it eats as a compact warm parcel a customer can hold in one hand on the way back to a desk.

The point of the bread is what it does to the sausage. Pizza bianca comes off the hearth blistered, faintly chewy inside, the upper face brushed with olive oil and scattered with coarse salt. It is taken from the oven within the last half hour. Mortadella goes in cool from the deli case and warm-not-hot bread is exactly what it needs: enough residual heat to soften the cubes of white back fat in the slice, not enough to render them out and grease the bread. The two halves of the bread close on the cool sausage, the fat begins to slacken inside the seam on the walk to the counter, and the first bite already has the perfume of warm mortadella in it. Bread cooler than that and the fat stays solid. Bread straight from the oven and the sausage turns slick.

It breaks on the sausage's preparation. Sliced thick on a slab the mortadella reads as a single dense pink wedge between two layers of bread; sliced too thin on a machine the slice tears and dries before it warms. Hand-sliced to a controlled thinness and ribboned loose in soft waves with air caught at every fold, the sausage stays buoyant and the bite gives easily. The bread fails on its own axis, time. A piece cut from a length that has been sitting too long on the counter has no warmth left to lend, and the panino reads as cold sausage on flat bread. Salt is the third failure mode. The bread already carries the coarse salt scattered on the oil before the oven, and a customer who reaches for the shaker is overdosing a build that was calibrated to its own bread.

The smell at the forno counter is warm oiled bread first, with the soft cured perfume of the sausage rising as the seam closes. The parcel is wide, light, blistered gold on the outer face. Open the paper and the first bite gives a thin crisp at the upper crust, then the soft open crumb, then the mortadella arrives at the centre, cool turning to silk, releasing a mild sweet spiced perfume as the fat slackens. A pistachio version delivers a small green nuttiness alongside the sausage. The flatbread is little more than salted oil-rubbed crumb; the sausage is gentle and emulsified; the heat is residual; nothing in the bite is hot, nothing is sharp, and the whole panino is eaten in three or four bites.

The order at the counter is unambiguous and the dialect is half the order. Una pizza co' la mortazza, the request goes, in the abbreviated Roman shortening of both nouns, and the woman cuts a length off the tray by eye and weighs it on the scale. Mortazza is the Roman pet name for the sausage; pizza here means the flatbread, not a round of tomato and cheese. The panino is priced by the hundred-gram etto, the standard Roman bakery unit, with the price card under the glass quoting the cost of the bread separately from the cost of the sausage. At Antico Forno Roscioli a few streets from Campo de' Fiori, at the Roscioli-family bakery first opened on Via dei Chiavari in 1824, the panino is the staple afternoon snack of the surrounding neighbourhood and of generations of Roman schoolchildren going home from class.

Its closest relatives are the other pizza bianca builds, each its own entry. The fig and prosciutto version is the August-into-October summer one, a sweet purple fruit and salt-cured leg in the same bread. The plain prosciutto bianca is the same fold with the cured raw ham alone and no fruit. The rosetta con mortadella swaps the soft flatbread for the hollow Roman roll, a crisp crackling shell against the same sausage rather than a soft warm pad. The Tuscan schiacciata con mortadella, made in Florence on a different oiled flatbread, is filled flat rather than folded, a separate sandwich built on a separate bread. Each has its own grammar at its own counter.

Origin and history

The panino has no named inventor and no dated first instance. It is the everyday meeting of two long-standing Roman counter items, the salted oil flatbread and the cured emulsified sausage, and the combination has been a Roman afternoon-snack reflex for as long as both ingredients have been on the same neighbourhood's bakery and deli shelves.

The bread is the older record on its own counter. Pizza bianca is a salted oiled flatbread the Roman bakers' tradition dates as their oven-testing piece, the dough first laid on the hearth to gauge whether the wood-fired oven was at temperature for the day's loaves, then turned over to feeding the surrounding neighbourhood as a cheap nourishing staple. The Forno Campo de' Fiori in the central Roman market square has been operating on the same site since 1880, and the bakery is taken as the most-cited modern reference for the bread itself across the city.

The sausage carries the harder dated record. Mortadella is Bolognese in origin, and a 24 October 1661 edict by Cardinal Girolamo Farnese in Bologna codified its production rules, specifying the cuts of pork allowed, banning the use of other meats, and authorising the Corporation of the Salaroli to enforce the standard. The European Union registered Mortadella Bologna as a Protected Geographical Indication product in 1998, the modern legal frame for the sausage; the registration tied the protected name, its emulsified pork composition, and its production method to a verified specification a producer must meet at the salumeria to claim the IGP mark.