Sándwich de Jamón

A few thin slices of jamón cocido, folded once so they sit with some body, laid on soft bread buttered just enough to keep it tender: that is the whole of it, and most of the time nobody adds a thing. The sándwich de jamón is the plainest of Argentina's fiambre sandwiches, cooked ham between bread and usually nothing more, the thing a parent packs in a lunchbox and a kiosco keeps ready behind the glass. It is the simplest decent lunch you can eat between two slices, and it stops exactly where it has done that.

What raises it above a generic ham sandwich is the bread it is built on. The default is pan de miga, a tall, fine-grained white loaf baked specifically to have its crust shaved off and be sliced into thin, pale sheets that fold without cracking. A panadería sells it by the slab; the crust is waste here, the soft interior the entire product, which is why the bread costs more to make than a plain roll and why a good miga loaf is the dividing line between a tender sandwich and a stiff one. Buttering it to the corners does quiet structural work too, sealing the crumb against the ham's faint moisture so the thing holds for hours in a lunchbox.

That loaf is not a local invention. It descends from the Italian tramezzino, the crustless triangle first served, by most accounts, at the Caffè Mulassano in Turin around 1925, with the name credited to the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio from tramezzo, an in-between. Northern Italian immigrants carried the form to Buenos Aires, where it was reshaped into the rectangular sándwich de miga and stacked, in its finest dress, three or four thin layers tall. A second story, reported in the Argentine press, gives credit instead to porteño bakers improvising soft English-style bread for homesick British engineers early in the century; both may hold a thread of truth, and neither is a settled fact.

Whatever the lineage, the miga sandwich arrived as a luxury, not a default. Through the first decades of the twentieth century it was an expensive, exclusive thing, sold from the grand confiterías along Avenida de Mayo and Rivadavia. Las Violetas, on the corner of Rivadavia and Medrano in Almagro, opened in 1884 and is still named in the same breath as its sándwiches de miga; in shops like it, and Las Delicias and Los Dos Boulevares, a tray of trimmed crustless triangles was the sort of food you bought for a celebration, not a Tuesday. The cheap kiosco version most Argentines eat now is the descendant of an upper-room delicacy.

The plainest of these, jamón alone, is also the baseline the rest of the fiambre family is measured against. Slide in a slice of melting cheese and it becomes the sándwich de jamón y queso, the most common next step; press it hot and it is the tostado. The one nearby sandwich it is regularly confused with is the sándwich de jamón crudo, a separate thing built on cured raw ham, saltier and denser and more assertive, where this is the cooked, mild, everyday slice. The two are not interchangeable, and a porteño asking for one will not accept the other.

The Ham That Came from the Frigorífico

The ham sandwich has no inventor and no founding date, here or anywhere, and claiming one would be inventing history. What is not anonymous is the ham. Jamón cocido, the wet-cured, gently cooked leg that fills this sandwich, is a nineteenth-century product, much younger than the air-cured raw hams it borrows its name from, and the everyday Argentine version is the work of a single industry.

That industry was the frigorífico. The cold-storage meatpacking plants that made Argentina the world's beef exporter from the 1900s turned, between the wars, to chacinados and fiambres for the home market, and the sliced cooked ham behind every kiosco's glass is what they put out at scale. The clearest case is Paladini, started in 1923 when Juan Paladini, from a family that had emigrated from Lucca, set up in Villa Gobernador Gálvez just south of Rosario and began curing pork; the firm grew into one of the country's largest fiambre makers and, by its own account, the first to export Argentine cold cuts to Brazil.

So the two halves of the sandwich sit on opposite sides of the record. The miga loaf came up from a Turinese café through immigrant hands and a row of marble confiterías; the ham came out of an industrial plant whose own history is written down to the year. The plainest thing in the Argentine repertoire turns out to carry two separate migrations inside it, a crustless slice descended from the tramezzino and a leg of jamón cocido traceable to an inter-war meatpacker like Paladini, in business since 1923.